Fast forward to the year 2000. Myst III: Exile is in development, and Mattel Interactive needs some way to get the brand name Myst back in the consciousness of the consumers. What’s the best way to do that? Throw a new graphics engine on an old game, allow the player freedom of movement (mostly) as opposed to the original’s slide show game play, slightly change the name and grab some serious shelf space at K–Marts worldwide. That’s exactly what Mattel did with RealMyst, a highly unsuccessful attempt at bringing Myst into the 21st century. According to game designer Rand Miller, "RealMyst is everything Myst is, but more real." Ermm . . . yeah.

There are a few things that RealMyst gets right, but they unfortunately don’t have much to do with the new features. The puzzles remain challenging and well–designed, and the storyline of a pair of brothers being trapped in a book by their world–creating author father is quite engaging. The new age of Rime, which links Myst to Riven, is absolutely gorgeous, with its gently falling nighttime snow. Unfortunately, these few things are about all RealMyst does right.

A quick rundown of the story may be in order for those who haven’t played the original, so here goes. Your character stumbles across some books that tell the story of an author, named Atrus, who can create actual worlds with a stroke of his pen. The books he writes contain links to other books/worlds, and it is by using the links in these books that your character gets around. You find Atrus’ two sons, Sirrus and Achemar, trapped inside a red book and a blue book, respectively, each one begging you to let them out by finding their book’s missing pages. The brothers apparently don’t take too kindly to one another, so in addition to asking for your help they also request that you DON’T release the other brother. Anyway, it’s up to you to decide which brother to save, if either, as you travel to four different ages to collect the missing pages and to reveal more of the plot. All in all, the story is enough to keep you interested in the game, I actually think it would make a decent motion picture. Better than Tomb Raider anyhow.

The most heinous problem with RealMyst is its utterly incompetent graphics engine. This thing is choppier than Julia Child on amphetamines (thank you, thank you — I’ll be here all week), and will have you wondering why the H–E–double–toothpicks you can’t play a seven– year–old game on your Pentium III 733 with 128MB of RAM. I understand that the graphics have been upgraded, but I don’t expect to need Deep Blue to play Myst. Another of the many annoyances are with the save game system. First off, you’re limited to only six saves — not enough for the normal adventure gamers, and CERTAINLY not enough for a game reviewer who needs to take screenshots from different areas of the game! In addition, the game saves take longer than any other computer game I can remember, you might as well go to lunch while RealMyst creates its apparently incredibly complex save game file.

In the it’s so bad it’s funny category lies the full–motion video segments of Atrus’ sons Sirrus and Achemar. As you find the missing pages to the red and blue books that serve as the siblings’ prison, you are treated to some of the funniest (unintentionally) acting this side of Roller Boogie. Couple that with the fact that the FMV screens are about as spacious as a postage stamp, and you've got the recipe as to why full–motion video never really panned out as the hot gaming technology it was supposed to be.

So in short, what you’ve got here with RealMyst is a failed update of an old game that basically now looks like an old game with an awful graphics engine. The puzzles and the plot are still good, but you can get those by purchasing the original Myst for a much cheaper price. It would be wise to realize RealMyst for what it is — a weak attempt at cashing in on an aging franchise. This is not an acceptable marketing strategy and buying the game will only send publishers such as Mattel fee the wrong message. Let’s prove them wrong.