URU Myst Online on Mac OSX

I have always enjoyed the Myst universe, both games and books. I am happy that URU was created, and wish to play. I was part of the public beta in late 2006, but stopped playing when the beta expired. Now that summer will afford a little more free time, I decided to reinvestigate the game.

My quest began at http://www.gametap.com/home/myst/ which promised that URU was available for both PC and Mac. Excellent, said I, for I had a spiffy new iMac, I’d be able to run the game with theoretically beautiful visuals. This incentive drove me to plunk down $83.40 for a 1 year subscription, after which I eagerly clicked through to download… a windows executable? What the shit is this?

I went back to the gametap homepage, which promised “Great Games”. Navigating around to the product pages prompts me to login again. This site has apparently not heard the wisdom of cookies. After login, I am cheerfully presented with a different 35mb windows installer of similar non-usefulness.

Googling for various combinations of “myst” “uru” “osx” “mac” turned up lots of people with happy news of the port, and no link to real information.

I pounded some pavement around the MystOnline Forums, and uncovered the following information:

• URU on OSX apparently runs in the Wine-based Cider wrapper from Transgaming. I have yet to be impressed with Transgaming, but I’ll give them another shot.
• The GMA 950 integrated graphics card is not currently supported. So I cannot play URU on my MacBook.
• Hamsta helpfully links to the Super Secret Mac OSX URU Myst Online Installer. Why the fuck gametap couldn’t do that, I have no idea.

I downloaded the URU installer on my macbook. It complained about the GMA 950 being unsupported, but let me continue anyway. It spent a half hour or so downloading updates, restarted, and let me login fine. The intro Myst video played fine, and took me to the Explorer name login screen. It let me create a character, though there were some occulsion and specular highlight issues in the character generator. The game itself runs smoothly, and apart from the main character’s clothing appears free of strange rendering artifacts.