What's your game?

Prince of Persia

I finally broke down and got Gamefly to send me Prince of Persia. I can pretty easily understand why it’s getting such mixed reviews. I got hung up on a spot in the first five minutes of the game, couldn’t figure out how to get past it, and was really pissed off. Got up, got a coke, sat back down, and nailed it on the first try.

For the unintiated, the original Prince of Persia was a flat-shaded 3D software rendered platformer. Unlike console platformers, where the key is getting the right timing and mashing the baddies, PoP was all about jumping puzzles and using the right combination of special moves to get past an obstacle. The original game was also notoriously unforgiving. When you completed a level in PoP, you had the distinct feeling that you just finished a tough challenge.

The new PoP manages to capture that same sense of insane difficulty yet ditch a lot of the annoying repetitiveness of the original. Mind you, there is still plenty of repetition. I think I repeated the first boss fight 20 times before I got the hang of fighting teams of four really tough guys at once. What amazes me is that the jumping puzzles are actually interesting. I think there are two reasons for that: I’m never sure if I’m actually going to clear a jump when I start out, and it’s always a challenge to get the jumps done flawlessly, even when you know what you should do.

The game further eases the pain of the “there’s only one way to complete this puzzle” gameplay by giving you occasional ‘visions’, which give the gamer who’s paying attention quick glimpses of the proper strategy for tackling the next room.

Perhaps most telling is that I sat down with the game around 10PM, and just looked up 20 minutes ago when I realized it was almost 2AM. I’ve not played a game with such a strong “just one more section” feeling in quite a while.