Midianian's Blog / Tags / “Prince of Persia” |
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No DRM in Retail Prince of Persia for PCDecember 15, 2008, 04:21 PMWow. Just... wow. Something like this really makes me want to buy it (if only to show support), but... from what I've seen, it sucks. I'm not going to buy a bad game just because it doesn't have DRM. Well, I certainly won't be pirating it. Prince of Persia (NG)August 23, 2008, 11:36 PMThe new one. The one they couldn't think of a name for, so they just gave it the name of the first game in the series. Bleh. I mean, come on. I'm pretty sure the game doesn't even take place in Persia anymore. The main characters certainly don't look very persian to me. They look more like a cross-breed between those wacky Final Fantasy kids and Hollywood actors with a little tan thrown in for at least some credibility. Prince of Bel-Air would be a more accurate name. Also, now the prince is hauling with him a magical girl who he can use for double jumps, seeing where he should be going, and other crap like that. So, they don't trust their players to even find the path without having an in-game walkthrough button? The most disturbing thing about her is that her animations are pretty much the same as the prince's, and she follows about one second behind the prince. She's like a fucking clone, separated slightly in time. So much for immersion. The level-design looks even more retarded than in Sands of Time. You've got these magical trampolines in random spots of a mountain's wall. Really. It makes absolutely no sense. I doubt the rest of the game will have any better design. The acrobatic moves look... unbelievable. "Unbelievable" as in "completely disregards the laws of physics", not "fucking awesome". Having no variance in the animations makes the jumping and running look very, very rigid. The dialog sounds forced and they story doesn't seem very interesting. Yeah, a lot of the things here might get fixed before it's released, but it's still very unlikely I will ever find myself playing it. Review: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (the Game)August 20, 2008, 04:36 PMI have to admit that I can't really understand how this game is as liked as it is. It has several glaring flaws. Combat is bad. Most of the game the only way to kill an enemy is by stabbing them with the knife when they're lying on the ground. That isn't bad in itself, but the same button is used for a special attack that almost always takes precedence over stabbing the enemy lying on the ground. Now that's bad. Oh, and enemies continue to pop into the area until the game thinks you've had enough. And if you walk too far from the enemies they'll teleport right next to you. Yeah. Sure, the sand-things explains why it happens, but in no way does it justify it. I've yet to see a game that benefits from having enemies spawn out of nowhere. I'm not usually the kind of guy to complain about a thing like this, but there's only about ten different types of enemies. And they can be quite neatly divided into three categories with only slight variations in them:
As far as I can tell, the bats are there just to make the game longer and more annoying. They almost always appear when you're walking on a beam or a ledge. Taking out your weapon either slows you down tremendously (if on a beam), or stops you completely (if on a ledge) and killing the bats takes a considerable amount of time. However, the single worst enemy in the game is... the camera. About half of the time it seems to be in the least comfortable position. Moving it is a pain in the ass, as the movement slows down if there's a wall behind it. Really slows down. And then it occasionally moves really fast instead of really slow, and makes this swooshing sound. Oh, and when you're moving, it glides into the position favored by the game, so trying to keep it where it's better actually makes it worse. The worst places are low areas with pillars, where the camera can easily get you killed. The level-design is pretty retarded at times. It would have been nice if they had designed the places first in a way that actually makes sense, insead of just making it a weird obstacle course for the player. For example at one location there's a platform on the wall, which has stairs that lead to another platform. Neither of the platforms is connected to anything else. Some corridors seem to be there just so they had places to put traps in. Some alternate routes would also have been nice. Even hints of an alternate route would have been nice. As it is, you don't actually have to find the route, just following the tracks. Then there's the rewind mechanic. If it weren't for the rewind mechanic, the game would be a humongous pile of shit. And guess what? They take the mechanic away for the last 10% of the game. So, that leaves the last 10% of the game a pile of shit. That's also pretty much the hardest part of the game. I can tell you that the last 10% took about a fifth of the time I spent playing the game. You get the dagger back for a large fight before the final boss. But the really shitty thing about that is that the sand-tanks are empty, meaning you can't do shit with it. And the sword you get a little before that pulverizes the enemies, so you can't even drain sand from them. The only way I could find to recharge the sand-tanks was by getting one of the enemies to swing other enemies down. Then try to get there before they rise back up and hope that the dagger-attack targets the guy on the ground and not any of the other enemies around you. As for the final boss, I didn't actually even need the knife there. It would've been much better to have it during the annoying platforming and the big fight before the boss. The rewind mechanic compensates a lot of the things that are crappy in the game, but there's a lot to compensate. It's one of the two things that make the game worth playing. The other is the story/dialog, which is OK (ie. better than most games). The voice acting is nice, but the music often times isn't. Distorted guitars just don't belong to my vision of Persia. Not even during fight-scenes. So, on a scale from Sucks to Rocks, I give it a Meh. And mind you, that's on the lower end of Meh. Now, having played the game, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the movie ended up being better. The Prince of Persia MovieAugust 18, 2008, 10:24 PMIt might actually be good. How?
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