A Series of Tubes

This post is way, way, way late, but I’m going to post it nonetheless. So Uru is now an episodic game, with all the storyline advancements and content releases occurring in one week every month. This month’s episode (the first episode ever) was called “Scars”, and ran from the 19th to the 24th or 25th. There’s some disagreement about when exactly the episode ended, because there were new things discovered on the 25th and 26th, but they might have been released on the 24th.

Anyway the episode was very dramatic. It started off with a collapse in the cavern, which trapped two teenage girls, one being the daughter of Michael Engberg, a member of the DRC. The other girl was immediately killed. After some time, it was discovered that a Bahro was in the collapse with Wheely Engberg. The excavation continued.

On the 22nd, Wheely Engberg was killed by the Bahro. It was reported to have screamed “Noloben” (an age from Myst V on which the Bahro were tortured and experimented on), and then brutally murdered her.

On the same day, Douglas Sharper (another member of the DRC, who had been on a hunting expedition in Negilahn to try and find the predator killing all the animals) returned, and told a wild tale of a Bahro civil war he had witnessed. There were many Bahro who tried to kill him, and many who protected him, but the battle was brutal.

On the 23rd, Michael Engberg was seen at the memorial site, then linked to the Great Shaft and disappeared. He is still MIA.

On the 24th, the DRC decided that despite all the tragedy that week, they would go ahead with the planned release of Minkata, a new age. This cheered up the whole community a lot, as can be seen by this poll. The age is a huge desert age with a bunch of tiny caves in the ground. The goal of the age is to find all 5 caves and touch the stones in them. Touching a stone puts the entire desert into night, and touching it again brings it back to day. The age has a lot of new music, which is very awesome.

And that’s basically all that happened during Episode 1 of Uru. If they continue to be like this, Uru will definitely become much more popular in no time. This episode brought it back up to #1 on Gametap again, where it still is today.

Now that I have used Uru on Mac for a day or so, I’m writing a follow-up review. All in all, it’s much better than trying to deal with Vista on unsupported hardware, and it performs about the same as the windows client does, which is good. There is no noticable lag (I got a tiny bit in the hood, but it was momentary), link times were not extreme, downloads for ages are decent…They’re slightly faster than on Vista, actually…but again, my wifi card is not supported with Vista drivers yet so that could be the problem.

One annoyance though. It doesn’t do windowed mode. You have to run it full-screen, and you don’t have nearly all the resolutions the windows client does. I had to use 1280×800 (as opposed to the 1440×900 that is the native for my default monitor, or the 1650×1080 for my external), which isn’t horrible but it looks blurry. Oh well.

Also just a general Uru gripe, dual monitors are useless, you can only use the primary one. Which is annoying when your secondary is so much bigger (15″ vs 22″, 22″ wins). It’s even more annoying when said fullscreen app renders the secondary monitor useless, since it blacks it out too and doesn’t let the cursor go over it. Whatever.

All in all, Uru for Mac is a great thing, and a long-awaited development, I think (since Uru was the only Myst game not compatible with Mac, not counting the fact that it’s next to impossible to run any of them on Intel macs…). If it had windowed mode it would be perfect.