Introduction

I'm not a gamer by pretty much any definition of the word. By the end of most days my poor, tired wrists have had enough abuse from writing with nothing left over for recreational purposes. So my need to avoid lots of key and mouse clicks, plus my dislike for fighting and killing, doesn't leave me much choice in today's gaming market.

Each winter, though, my wife and I like to hunker down and play an adventure-genre game. We started this tradition a number of years ago with the original Myst and have looked forward to the release of each new installment in the Myst series with eager anticipation. But it appears that our affinity for the Myst franchise has sadly come to an end.

In Use

As I said, I'm not a gamer, so my PCs have never been equipped with anything except their built-in graphics capability. Myst (and other) game installs usually always take me an hour or two of downloading and installing Direct X and drivers upgrades as well as the latest patches for the game itself.

Though not fun, this effort is probably to be expected, since my computers are generally previous-generation refurb'd general-use machines. I've always managed to get the games running, though, even if some tended to annoyingly lock up at just the wrong time.

When I sat down to install Uru, however, I expected smooth sailing. Like my previous machines, my HP Pavilion 716n is also a refurb, but has a 2.4 GHz P4, 500 MB or so of memory, DVD / CD writer, built-in memory card reader and USB 2.0 and Firewire ports. "This baby should be able to run anything", I thought as I loaded Uru's CD into the drive.

After a very long install, I launched the game and watched the opening title sequence. The video and music brought back pleasant thoughts of previous visits to Myst's worlds, but also memories of the dreaded crash to the desktop that usually occurs with the transition from title sequence to game play.

So it wasn't a complete surprise that Uru, like its predecessors before it, also crashed and burned once the intro video was through. Ok, I figured, this is just going to be as difficult as previous Myst-series installs. So I dug into Google to see what work-arounds others had come up with.

But it was not to be. This game - which turns out isn't the next Myst installment but instead Ubisoft's attempt to move Myst fans to an on-going "online community" ($) - will not run on a PC using any of Intel's graphics chipsets. Intel isn't being singled out, however, since it also won't run on any other of the other graphics cards listed on

Listen, guys. I don't want no steenking "relationship" with you, nor do I want the marketing emails that will surely follow once you have my name and email address. All I want to do is tell you is how disappointed I am with your product and general corporate attitude.