Above: It's no Sands of Time -- but then, what is?My review of the new Prince of Persia is up now at thephoenix.com. I'm a bit surprised at how much conversation has sprung up around this game,* and while I've enjoyed reading it all I haven't felt compelled to respond. I thought it was a good, not great, game that overstayed its welcome, despite not being overly long.
The conversations about the difficulty level are interesting, as are various thoughts about the ending, but I don't know. Well before the ending, I had kind of stopped caring. But I was having a heck of a lot of fun for a good bit of time before that.
I know, this is why I didn't say much about PoP before now. This is how boring it would have been!
*Cf.
-The Brainy Gamer's four-part series, here, here, here, and here
-Shamus Young's video at Twenty Sided Die
-Tom Cross's "Diamond in the Rough" at GameSetWatch
-Scott Juster at Experience Points
-Sparky Clarkson at Discount Thoughts
-Sean's VideoGame Musings
-Probably more
3 comments:
For me the new PoP was another big yawn, as was COD: WaW and Dead Space, and even Metal Gear Solid 4 to a great extent. Sometimes developers breath actual life into their games, examples being Fable II, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, and Lost Odyssey -- all games that don't break the mold but offer a fresh experience none-the-less -- and other times they just turn out games that don't offer anything to inspire me to play them. PoP is one of those games. Good technically and graphically, but so-so game play-wise.
What struck me about about the "run, jump, die, repeat" mechanic was the fact that "repeat" didn't mean "repeat the level from the beginning." It meant "repeat the last action," which is what made the game so appealing for my significant other. She isn't a very experienced platformer, so the repetition was more instructive than punitive.
Did you at any time feel like the game was similar to playing a rhythm game? Because the precision of the jumps were de-emphasized, I began paying more attention to the sequence and timing of my button presses.
Rock Band it ain't, but I did hear echoes of it once in a while.
Somewhat like a rhythm game, yeah, especially since so many of the actions were accomplished by the same button. You sort of lost that connection between a specific button press and a specific action, and instead it was more about whether you could push the button at the right time. But "the right time" wasn't narrowly defined -- the game was extremely forgiving about timing.
Still, since you'd always wall run for the same distance or climb for the same height no matter where you were, it was easy to fall into some kind of a rhythm.
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