edg | Prince of Persia

Just finished Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. My final time was somewhere around 10h30m - the last save is at 10h11m, and there's 10-20 minutes of game left at that point - although I didn't collect nearly everything there was to collect. (Notably, I didn't unlock the original Prince of Persia.)

Spoilers: Highlight to read. (If you're reading on a non-white background, sorry, them's the breaks.)First, the negatives:

They still don't have the camera right. It's very good, but there are moments - especially in combat - where the camera gets hung up on a wall, or hides behind some drapery so you can't see anything. You can move it manually at almost any time (the exception is when you have it set to Landscape mode), but when your thumbs are desperately getting you out of a corner it's not exactly the easiest thing in the world to do. Also, the camera treats walls as solid - so you can't get a good aspect in certain places, because the camera won't go where you need it to.

Speaking of being in corners: there are two kinds of enemies in the game, if you generalize a lot and squint real hard - big enemes, who dress in blue, and small enemies, who dress in red. Aside from the big enemies being a lot tougher to kill, they negate one of the Prince's most effective combat techniques - vaulting over the enemy's head - because they can - and usually do - catch him in midair with their weapons, which the small enemies can't do. Once you figure this out, it almost never actually comes up, except in one situation: the Prince's enemies like to gang up on him and stick him in a corner or circle around him. With small enemies, you can just vault over their heads and get out of the mix, but with large enemies - who are far more fond of this stunt - you pretty much have to fight your way out, unless you get madly lucky. There are two quirks which make things even worse:
- Big enemies are far more likely to be able to block your attacks.
- Prince of Persia doesn't believe in this "if you take damage, you're invincible for a second or two" nonsense. The enemies will happily take advantage of this and repeatedly smack you while you're down - not incidentally, preventing you from getting back up.

There are some problems with collision detection and the solidity of objects. In particular, in one place (the caverns) I managed to grab a ledge too close to the edge, and ended up stuck, with the camera vibrating merrily until I deliberately fell (I was out of sand) and restarted the level. In another (the rising platform in the Tower of Dawn) the Prince became embedded in a staircase, and managed to "wade" quite a distance through it before events necessitated that I rewind to back before he'd jumped in.

There are some areas where the game suffers slowdown because of the large volume of moving objects. In particular, this happens in areas where combat is going on in the same place as a batch of free-floating dust.

I figured out the ending as soon as I hit the second major battle (Death of a Sand King), although I didn't anticipate quite how far back they'd go. This isn't a deal-breaker, I'm just sayin'.

And the positives:

Oh my God this game was fun. Seriously. If you haven't played this, you should. (Although if you get frustrated at puzzles or at action games that require precise movements, then maybe not.) Aside from what I listed above, I can't think of anything to really complain about that isn't actually a feature of the game.

Here's an example: The Dagger of Time lets you reverse the flow of time briefly. You have a certain amount of time that you can rewind (noted by a little dial in the upper right, just under a hook in your life bar which I thought was a really neat touch), which allows you to correct mistakes you've made (like, say, accidentally running into a pit of spikes) - or to experiment and find out What Happens If I Do This. So on the second-to-last level, where they take the Dagger away, I found myself doing odd things just to see if that was what I was supposed to do, and then getting frustrated when I couldn't turn the clock back and had to start over at a recent checkpoint. Note that I don't think this is a bad thing - if anything, it indicates how well the feature has been integrated into the game.

Graphics: not perfect, but good. I loved the comment on one of the FAQs (yes, I use FAQs when I get stuck, I see no shame in it): "God, the original game sucks!" No, the original game kicks so much ass that it doesn't have any time to take names. We're just used to games looking more pretty, having three dimensions, and being interspersed with high-quality cinematics. (I think I still have the original Mac version of Prince of Persia. I remember it came in an odd-shaped box, which I thought was pretty cool.) Anyway, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time's graphics aren't absolutely top-notch, but they're about as good as you get for a game that's, what, two years old now? In addition, the scene design is fantastic - at several points I noted to myself how similar a given room looked to my memory of places like the Alhambra or the Alcazar of Toledo.

Sound: 99% happy with the sound and music in this game. The dialogue is well-written, and the voice acting is top-notch (the Prince in particular has some great lines). My only complaint is that the music director turned the final-credits music into a rock ballad, which frustrates me in much the same way as "I Am The Wind" did at the end of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (although this game's music is, to its credit, actually a rearrangement of one of the key themes in the game, as opposed to Castlevania's soundtrack of gothic-classical orchestral music followed by light jazz over the end credits).

Gameplay: again, not perfect, but good. The camera still needs work, which I think is most of it - there are a few scenes where you have to make precision jumps and aren't given a good camera angle to time/position yourself. Also, the collision detection could have been tighter. Other than that, I have no quibbles with the control. The settings are universally very, very good, although there are some places where you're forced to save on a half-empty health bar, which is frustrating, especially since health is so easy to replace in this game (you replenish your health bar by drinking water, which is found all over the place - except near a few save points).

Replay value: Given that I actually want to play this game again - if nothing else, I know there are a number of secrets I didn't get - I'll rate this game high. It's also just a joy to play most of the time, and I'd want to replay it just to enjoy moving through the palace that comprises 95% of the game's setting.

End result:

3.5 Right Hands of Doom

Now I need to look for a soundtrack to this game, because man, that was a good soundtrack.

(As an aside, I actually do have an MP3 of "I Am The Wind". Go figure.)

(Although it's apparently only a partial. Hm.)