So, I picked up realMyst:ME yesterday... I have mixed feelings about it.
On one hand I am absolutely grateful that Cyan has taken the time to port Myst to a new engine, not once, but twice! Having toyed in the game mod scene for a time, I can honestly say it is a HUGE undertaking to do what they have done, and they fully deserve the $15 they are asking for regardless of the 5 previous versions I've bought over the years (3DO, PC, iOS, etc.). Fool I may be, but I love the game. Now if they would only get the gumption up enough to redo Riven...
The mixed feelings I have are more about the technical aspects. Why not just release an updated Plasma version and send patches upstream to the open source CyanWorlds engine?
A little
digging reveals why realMyst ME was developed on the Unity3D engine. Apparently while attempting to port realMyst to the iPad, they had better luck migrating the original realMyst data to Unity 3D than they did with porting their own Plasma engine to iOS.
"Based on early experimentation, the programming team was convinced that realMyst could be ported to Unity, and that it would run and look better than the original, with multi-platform options to boot." It would have been an awesome boon to the Myst modding community to see Cyan working to bolster the abilities of Plasma, and continue to work towards Open Source solutions; sending commit changes upstream to CWE. But they are primarily a story telling house and they need to make money to keep it up. If they can use existing technology at hand to get those stories out to us, that's just the way the economy works.