In the world of videogames, there are few times when something that failed has been given a second chance at success. GameTap has certainly done its part with not only bringing officially licensed emulation to PC users in the US, but also by taking on classic properties cast-off by their original publishers, such as "Sam & Max" and "Myst Online: Uru Live". It's the latter for which we have the latest press release, direct from GameTap. While I have the original game sent by a friend who used to work at Ubisoft, I never did get a chance to try it. I'm certainly not the biggest Myst fan out there, but I do have countless conversions of the original that started it all and this massively multiplayer version does seem intriguing and takes some of the best elements from the later games. As a GameTap subscriber myself, I'll definitely try to check this re-launch out.

The full press release follows:

Game design blog Sirlin had an article about the death of the Graphical Adventure Game genre. While this is nothing new, he has a theory on how to craft a GAG with more dynamic gameplay elements. Here's a clip.

It’s probably not technically feasible to allow different outcomes to branch into a huge tree of totally different stories, nor is it even desirable. The opponents of interactive fiction state that any story is really 1,000 possible stories where the author intelligently chose the one, single best story to tell. It would still be possible, though, to create a game world whose major story arc was resistant to change, while allowing change on the smaller scale. It might even be fun.