title="Myst"> alt="Channelwood Age"/>

You can't go home again. The clich? about ceaseless change frequently and regrettably applies to videogames. We inevitably mature, gaining experience and perspective, and those places we seek to revisit, whether they be our childhood homes or fantastic videogame worlds, succumb to age, especially when their caretakers allow them to fall into disrepair. Playing Myst DS is like visiting a Disney World faded by weather and wear, or, even worse, suffering from half-assed bits of maintenance that ruin the intention of the geniuses who made the place. So, actually, playing Myst DS is just like going to Disney World: a nostalgic bummer.

Oddly enough there were once plans for the world of Myst to be made real on Walt Disney World property. The plan was to convert Tom Sawyer's Island into a live-in puzzle. Potential explorers would pay a fee to be stranded on the isle with a handful of other tourists. That's how wide Myst's appeal once was. Until The Sims came along, Myst was the best-selling PC game of all time and with good reason. The spare, lovely game transported players to a mysterious place, an island linked to a handful of other worlds by magical books. Millions were drawn into this lonely place, frustrated and fascinated by the game's puzzling world, engaged by its unassuming story about the power of the imagination and very real consequences of power.

The game, created by brothers Robyn and Rand Miller, was originally released in 1993 for the Macintosh and has since been ported to nearly every console known to man. Myst, with its rudimentary visuals, is a low-fidelity relic, a piece of history just as dusty and dated as the objects it sets out to create. And yet its impact still feels diminished when played on the tiny screen of the Nintendo DS.

title="Myst"> alt="Stoneship Age"/>

My first trip to Myst was soon after the game was released. I played on an expensive PC bought with my first college loan. Though my monitor was small and my speakers crappy, I still felt transported to another place when I booted up. At the time the game's static snapshots represented the height of computer-generated art. To explore, the game players clicked on each image and, depending where they touched the picture, they'd rotate to view the scene from another fixed angle or move to a spot somewhere down a path or passageway.

Navigating like this today feels like watching a slideshow, like the stuttering frames of the experimental French film "La Jet?e." But the Rand brothers cleverly made the best of their limitations. Gorgeous audio clips added an atmospheric ambiance to each image. Another layer of sound, an ominous soundtrack, further pulled players into the world. Even today these techniques are enough to engulf any gamer with the least willingness to suspend disbelief.

Sadly, Myst DS manages to squander this magic. The game's audio is surprisingly raggedy and some clips load at inappropriate moments. The sound of wind whipping an outdoor microphone, for instance, loops when the player is trapped in a sealed submersible. This clip works well when you're standing on Myst's high ground surrounded by sea, but it feels misplaced indoors or underground.

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title="Myst"> alt="Mechanical Age"/>

The game's images are similarly diminished, a problem made worse since the porthole into the Myst world, as viewed on the DS's touch-screen, is cropped by a permanent tool bar. A magnifying glass allows players to zoom in on scenery, but, with the exception of coming in handy to read books, simply blows an image up, making everything appear more pixelated and ugly.

There's a camera that lets you take screen shots of the game, a feature that could come in handy were it not so unwieldy and untrustworthy. The notebook is woefully underdeveloped. Half the fun of playing adventure games comes from scribbling notes on scrap paper. Myst DS could have gone the way of Etrian Odyssey and given the player the means to sketch out their own maps or draw their own interpretations of the many symbols encountered in the game. Instead, they saddle the player with a worthless typewriter interface, which forces and endless hunting and pecking with the stylus.

title="Myst"> alt="Observation deck"/>

It's touch-screen interaction that really sinks Myst DS. In traditional point-and-click games, the mouse is the player's sole means of exploring the game world. Here the mouse is replaced with the Nintendo DS stylus. But one key element is lost in the transition. When playing Myst in most of its other incarnations the player could see their cursor. When the cursor passed over something usable like a button, knob or item, the cursor would change, providing vital feedback to the player that the area they discovered was useful and part of the puzzle.

There's no such visual feedback in Myst DS, an oversight and near tragic absence of vision that frequently leads the player to overlook clues. To make matters worse, many of Myst's mechanical control panels become cramped on the tiny touch-screen, making it difficult to manipulate buttons or dials with any kind of accuracy. The game's difficult puzzles are already designed to befuddle. Nobody needs more frustration.

There's really so much to love about the original Myst game. Arm's-length storytelling let players experience the game's mythology on their own terms. Those who cared to dig into diaries and notebooks could learn more about the mind of Atrus, the thinker who handcrafted each of Myst's magical ages. Exploration generated a gut-level reaction. What purpose did those rusty machines and medieval-looking torture devices serve? And what kind of person would create or use such things? The sense of dread and wonder may be scaled back when playing a buggy, careless re-release like Myst DS, but it's still there. Some things time and man can smother, but never entirely snuff.

This review is based on a final retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.