July 29, 2009

You throw me across gaps, I’ll throw you at enemies.

My latest Gamefly rental and playthrough was that of Prince of Persia. Not the old one. The new one that they decided to just name Prince of Persia. You know, the baby game where a magical girl saves you every five seconds so you don’t die? That one?

It was a pretty damn fun game.

I mean, sure, it was shitty of them to lock the real ending behind 10 dollars of DLC. (which I didn’t even try for) Their combat system could have used a significant amount of work, seeing as it was extremely repetitive, and repeating 4 extremely similar bosses over and over certainly didn’t help that.

But it was fun. Really.

I’ve talked before about how awesome it is to play a game that is just fun, and doesn’t try to be retardedly challenging or whatever. That is pretty well exactly what Prince of Persia is. You are never in any risk of losing any more than maybe a minute’s progress at any point in time. You can just sit back and enjoy jumping like crazy along walls and swinging from poles and all that stuff. If you miss a jump, no big deal. You start back the last time you were on solid ground, and besides one or two locations, the game is smart enough to give you areas of solid ground at regular intervals, so you never fall too far behind.
The game also does characterization mostly right. Although it would have been better to have the conversations happen while actually playing the game, the conversations between the Prince and Elika are quite entertaining. They have a very nice, fun banter going, and you’ll listen to them because they’re so much fun. What’s more, the animations also do a very good job of conveying their relationship. Having the Prince excuse himself as he moves past Elika on a ledge or pulling her up on his back as he scales a wall is just these little simple things that make them seem a bit closer. I think it’s rather neat. Add into that the cliffhanger ending, which is handled with game mechanics in a very clever way, and you have some fairly solid, if not particularly deep characters. They’re a lot of fun.

Overall, though, I’m glad I never bought Prince of Persia. I think I might have been a lot harder on it had I paid $60 for it or whatever. But it is a damn fun experience, and it is completely worth your time to play.
Unless you’re, I dunno, someone who demands that every game be like I Wanna Be The Guy. Then you’re probably out of luck.

[…] really, really enjoyed what people call PoP 08. It was a great, casual experience, and was a really good time. When I heard, for the next Prince […]

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