Most of you visiting this site have probably finished Riven and are still blown away at what a wonderful masterpiece Cyan has created. But as you may know, when several years and countless man-hours are put into a project as complex and massive as Riven, some things are bound to get overlooked. This collection is for those of you who know what great fun it can be to hunt for and point the finger at oversights and foul-ups in other people's creations. So get out your Riven discs and see for yourself how incredible realism can produce incredible nitpicking!

The best way to experience good nitpicking is to load up the game and see the nits for yourself in the actual Fifth Age, using this site as a reference. I've categorized each nit by the island the nit is visible or noticable from, and included images of most nits to assist you in where to look. In addition to the nits, I've also listed various personal observations, thoughts, and musings on stuff I've encountered during my explorations of the Fifth Age.

One last thing: True nitpicking is about simply taking a fun light-hearted look at things that might be wrong with a production, and NOT about bashing others' work. This is the standard I have tried to uphold in this collection. Remember this as you enjoy this site. With that said, on to the nits!

Get out your discs and get ready to nitpick on: Temple Island    Jungle Island    Bookmaking Island    Garden Island    Prison Island    Moiety Age    233rd Age

This site is strictly a fan site and is not sponsored by, authorized by, or affiliated with Cyan, Inc., or for that matter, anyone else. This site was created by HLR Productions. Copyright © 1998. Riven: Copyright © 1997 Cyan, Inc. All rights reserved Riven® is a registered trademark of Cyan, Inc. All screenshots and Riven likenesses used by permission of Cyan, Inc. Contact: HLR Productions (That's my handle:) it doesn't mean anything) This page is hosted by Create your very own home page Absolutely Free!

These HTML documents were coded by hand and were tested using Netscape 4.05 and Internet Explorer 3.0. This site should look about the same on both, but use Netscape 4.05 or IE 4.0 with the window at 800 pixels wide for best formatting and presentation.     I made most of the screenshots by alt-printscreen-ing in the game, using the Independent JPEG Group's CJPEG program to slightly blur the image by subsampling the LUMA channel 2 to 1 (-sample 1x1,2x2,2x2 -quality 100), converting it back to .BMP, using MSPaint to shrink it to 35% or so, cropping it some, and finally using CJPEG (the only smart way to make JPEG images!) with 2:1 chroma subsampling (some are 1:1) and an average quality of 75.     I made the .GIF images with a drawing program complete with .GIF encoder that I wrote in QuickBASIC(!).