The installers for the Mac and Windows version of Myst V: End of Ages are a huge mess. Not only are they extremely buggy (with the Windows version still insisting that the game is installed, and can’t be installed again unless uninstalled first, and the Mac version claiming certain files are newer than expected, invariably hanging the entire system at either 40%or 90%, the Mac Intel patch yielding an AppleScript error, etc.); they’re also very inefficient at their main job (extracting and copying files) — see the screenshot below (the non-blurred processes are EoA’s) — , and, at least on the Mac side, they shouldn’t be necessary at all. Their proprietary format (again: why?) makes it tedious at best to install the game manually.

I finally got it to run on Mac OS X, in Rosetta (the Intel patch just won’t work, and the AppleScript that apparently does the main job doesn’t allow me to find out why), aka slow motion mode. While the intro (which I enjoyed watching) is nice, the actual game play is orders of a magnitude slower than the Windows demo was. A large part of this is Rosetta’s fault, I’m sure, but part of it seems to be just plain incompetence.

I hate to be so negative about a Myst game (and I’m sure a certain someone will complain again that Myst fans whine too much), but this experience was a nightmare — and it’s not over yet. I either need to get it to run as an Intel-native Mac version, or on Windows. There’s gotta be some kind of file or registry entry or anything that makes EoA think it’s already installed, but even with the help of Regmon and Filemon, I have yet to be successful at finding the reference.

eoa.command is a wrapper command in the Terminal (?!) that runs the installer; run is the actual installation program, written in Java, running in Rosetta. As you can see, more than 100% are being used. That means, on the plus side, that the installer is at least multithreaded (as it’s clearly using both cores). On the negative side, it simply shouldn’t need this much CPU power. Consistently. Even when just showing a stupid dialog of where I want to install to. Ugh.

Bad. Really, really, bad. If I didn’t know my way around the system, I wouldn’t even have gotten anywhere this far; I have no idea how an average user (with a slower system, no less) was supposed to work his way around this mess. :-\