Last updated on October 27, 2012
Welcome to Monday Update: Giant Storm Edition, where this will be written far in advance for fear of a later October storm that will knock out power in my region for a week. Ah, it’s great to live in New England! Well, more accurately put, it’s the…
Thanks Halloween for making light of a possible natural disaster.
I’m going to do something a little different this week – don’t worry, you’ll still get some inane commentary, but I wanted to highlight some other places I write and/or podcast for those who’ve come to the site recently.
First, we have my frequent collaborations with GameChurch. They’re a great bunch of guys, and I thank the whole GameChurch team for letting me write something different from my usual fair (as you’ll note when you read them). Take a look over there! Hop to it!
Second, I’ve made exactly one podcast appearance to date – although I’m hoping to rectify that problem at a later date. Patrick Gann gave me the opportunity to prattle on about myself and video games in The Jurassic Hour Podcast. Take a listen – there’s some bizarre discussions in there! Tell me if I should start a podcast myself (and the answer is obviously yes).
Thank you for indulging my shameless self-promotion – obviously, you’ll find the most honest stuff (har har) on this website, where I tend NOT to edit myself as I should – but that’s why you love me. Right? Right?
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time – I’m not sure why I’m playing all of these games published by Ubisoft, specifically those primarily made and designed by their Montreal branch, but here we are!
I’ve played the first of the modernized PoP games a long, long time ago; I remember having a favorable impression of it overall. And, frankly, just about every reviewer on the planet at that time also gave it greatly exaggerated scores. If you think of these games as the predecessors to Assassin’s Creed, it makes a lot of sense – they both involve combat and acrobatics. However, because of the game’s age, it doesn’t make things so incredibly easy that you fall asleep.
Case in point: you will die. The Prince’s acrobatics require – gasp! – precision and timing, rather than holding two buttons down at once and pressing forward. There’s a great deal of timed jumps, wall-runs, and gauntlet-style sections that require great reflex and skill. That was a relief – the game frustrated me as much as it did back in the day, providing a steady stream of unique and challenging scenarios. The noted “Sand of Time” just give you the ability to rewind time a short while to prevent your death. You CANNOT fall very far or you die instantly. That distance, coming from Ezio’s adventures, is difficult to judge, so it seemed a neccesity. Thankfully, the system’s not broken due to sand being a resource with limited charges. At times, I’d die intentionally to keep my sand bar full. There’s problems with camera angles and control accuracy – it definitely uses the same camera angle, context based controls which leads to stupid and unintentional deaths as Assassin’s Creed. That’s why they implemented the Sand system, I’d wager. You’ll just memorize the segment’s various tasks and move onto the next part.
The combat…well, it’s less than good, and hasn’t aged well – it commits a cardinal crime of video games: being really boring and dumb. I’ve found two unbelievably efficient strategies – vault over enemies and/or wall dive. Simply put, you get a lot of options, (parries, blocks, flip attacks, whatever) but no need to use them.Both work equally well in knocking enemies down. Now, once knocked down, you need to stab them with the Dagger of Time to kill enemies once and for all. This becomes inconsistently bizarre, as sometimes other enemies won’t attack, and sometimes they’ll knock you out of your stab animation. Yet, other times, they’ll stand there dumbfounded. It makes the stabbing mechanic unfair at times, as predicting enemy movements becomes a matter of luck. Sure, I could knock down EVERY enemy, but they’ll get back up. Oh, and thinning enemy numbers? Good luck with that – most encounters equate “challenge” with “endurance” – it’s not uncommon to face 12-16 powerful enemies in a row (though, thankfully, they only attack in groups of 4 at a time). It’s also weird why they let your companion, Farah, attack you in bouts of friendly fire – it doesn’t help. The controls, here, show their accuracy problems, as sometimes I’ll do exactly the wrong attack to the wrong enemy and get punished accordingly. These sequences become very frustrating at times, more a test of your endurance than anything else.
Still, the game’s well worth anyone’s time. The story, though not especially well told, has enough witty banter to entertain throughout (hey, just like the movie…which I also like!). The graphics have aged exceedingly well; whatever post-processing effects they layered on top of the cartoonish character models give it a storybook quality that hasn’t been seen in many games since (including its immediate sequel, the goth/Godsmack tribute Warrior Within…which I am going to play). The soundtrack, by Stuart Chatwood (of Canadian cult band The Tea Party), is also rather amazing, if rather sparse. Overall, I’d say go for it if you haven’t played it – it’s not perfect by any means (and certainly didn’t deserve the review scores it got), but it’s a more challenging game than most of them released today.
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That’s it for this week – a little short, but I gave you extra homework, so get to it. This week: a continuation of deconstructing God of War (read Part 1 if you haven’t), a review of Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, and probably something else I’ll think up soon enough. I’m not pinning myself down, that’s for sure.
