So what is Myth?
Well, Myth is strategy action war game mainly set in 'Lord of the Rings' type times. In it you must play through 25 levels again the evil Soulblighter and his armies of the dead and generally unpleasant creatures. The normal single player game is excellent, but Myth 2 (M2), can also be played multi-player over a LAN, or over the internet. Also, extra maps and levels can be downloaded from the net, and played single or multiplayer. So what makes M2 a great game then? Well, basically because it gives such a variety, some games are straight on kill everything that moves. In some levels you are well outnumbered, so you must learn how to fall back whilst not being overrun. In other levels you have to sacrifice large numbers of units to ensure others survive. Oh yes, and lots of huge explosions. There are a few bonus levels too, in one of which you play red-necks with blunderbusses, shooting suicidal exploding sheep (I'm not making this up). Although this game was released in late 1998, it still compares well, and is far better than other 3rd person war games like Age of Empires 2, which is just dull. Excellent animation, excellent sound (including Scottish berzerkers) and very impressive graphics make this a great experience too. It's available for Mac, PC and now Linux too. As far as hardware requirements go, I recommend a 3D accelerator card for hardware rendering, but it still plays well in software rendering on a standard 8Mb ATI. Sound also supports A3D and EAX for 3D stereo, and I must say, it sounds really good. The online M2 community is huge, producing hundreds of new maps to play, everything from American Civil War, to futuristic battles too.
Recently, the company behind the Myth series - Bungie - a stalwart of the Mac games scene for years, was bought by Microsoft as it beefs up for it's impending X-Box. However, we are promised That future games Oni and Halo, will come out on Mac and PC.
So what can I play it on?
Well, it plays fine on my Powerbook G3-233, using the RAVE system for hardware rendering. It also supports GLIDE (3dfx) on the PC as well as using D3D. A friend of mine who has a PB1400 (a 603 -114MHz) also ran it without incident so I should think that any Pentium 2 and PPC603 could run it OK. The option to use software rendering is adequate if your graphics card isn't very good at 3D (Like ATI Rage IIs), but if you can, go for the hardware option - faster refresh and really smooth landscapes - some of which are really convincing.
But what'll it cost man!?
Actually, it's currently available as part of the Total Codex collection (Myth1, Myth 2 and about 300Mb of add-ins) for a rather disgusting $20. Buy it!!!