Prince of Persia sort-of review

I can't help it; I'm still giddy about crossing 40,000. Wouldn't it be nice if the 360 gave your avatar a little balloon/confetti party every time you crossed a significant number?

For the record: I officially crossed 40,000 by getting the "Flawless Fretwork" Achievement in Rock Band 2. In the interest of full disclosure, though, I should also acknowledge that I was playing The Police's "Roxanne", which is not very hard at all on Expert. Indeed, I'd accidentally gotten 100% the previous day, but my guitar wasn't signed in as JervoNYC (alas, it was the drums) and I spent the next 20 minutes playing Roxanne over and over and over again and always spazzing out at the very end.

Anyway. I'm here to talk about Prince of Persia, which I finished in about 10 hours, pretty much all in one sitting.

My initial impressions ended up being pretty much spot-on; the game is beautiful and the art direction is truly impressive, and there are some vistas that are truly jaw-dropping. And, also, the controls never felt quite as tight as I wanted them to feel; the Prince doesn't immediately go into a full run, which messed up my timing a bit, and there are certain things in the game that never stopped being "new" - a perfect example being that when you jump to a surface below a ledge, you don't have to press "A" to jump again because you automatically jump up to the ledge; if you hit A during the tiny window between animations, you will inevitably jump to your doom - er, get reset to the last checkpoint. It took me almost 3/4 of the game to stop doing this.

Much has been made of the fact that you can't die in PoP; all this means is that if you miss a jump - and you will, and not always because it's your fault - you are "rescued" by Princess Elika, and you're taken back to the last place you were on solid ground. You're still dying, it's just that the game never stops moving forward. It's actually a nice addition and it ensures that you always have a sense of momentum; it's very hard to put down.

It is a shame, though, that much of your not-dying is because of issues with the controls, which is maybe my biggest problem with PoP, and is certainly the biggest issue with any game that requires precision. The thing that not-killed me the most in this game was whenever I'd jump to a pillar/column. Generally speaking, if you jump to a pillar, you'll automatically swing around to the back so that you can keep moving in the same direction. Sometimes, though, you don't want to move in the same direction, because (a) there are multiple paths to follow or (b) you want to move up instead of forward. In this case, you will swing your body around to the direction you want to face. The problem I had in these cases was that the animation for moving your body around takes a little bit of time and isn't always responsive, and the camera would occaisonally move in the opposite direction. Which is to say - I'd jump to a column, turn left and jump, but the game would interpret that to mean I'd jump to a column, turn right and jump into the abyss.

Other times, there's a jump you have to make that requires a double-jump. The game generally does a good job letting you know when these double-jumps are coming - the visual cue is that the screen starts turning black/white - but sometimes it doesn't, or the window you get is half as long as it normally is, and that just kinda sucks.

The first game in the last-gen series was almost perfect, and the thing that held it back was its combat, which just sucked. The 2nd game was apparently designed to maximize the shitty combat, and the 3rd game kinda refined it a bit but it was still shitty. The combat in this new iteration is generally much better, because you only fight one enemy at a time, and you don't fight very often. That said, it's not without some significant annoyances; you fight each of the 4 bosses multiple times, and with each successive encounter the fighting is broken up with QTE events, which break up the flow and, incredibly, do no actual harm. All that happens if you pass a QTE event is that you go back into combat. Furthermore, near the end of the game, each fight is basically 80% QTE, so your actual window to deal damage becomes progressively narrower until it's a wonder you're doing any damage at all. Even worse is that should you fail a QTE and the princess rescues you, the boss gets healed as well, and this never stopped being annoying.

I should probably back up a bit here and talk about the main point of my initial impression, which was that this new Prince was a bit of a douchebag. Ubisoft has had a real bitch of a time trying to find the right tone with the PoP series, which is odd because they totally got it right in Sands of Time. The 2nd game was all goth and naked chicks and being super intense and hardcore, as if that's what market research said that the franchise really needed, and the 3rd game... you know, I don't even really remember the 3rd game other than it was better than the 2nd one, which I stopped playing less than halfway through because I hated it so much.

Anyway. I think it's fair to say that this year's Prince never truly stops being a douchebag, although certainly there are moments near the end of the game where he lets up just a bit. The game's story is somewhat generic but interesting; there's a few twists but you can see them coming, and here I think there was a pleasant and unintended consequence as a result. (I'll try to keep this as spoiler-free as I can, but you may want to skip to the next paragraph just in case.) The Prince, in this game, is a bit thick; he spends an inordinate amount of time talking about chicks and gold and tomb raiding, and when he's asked about himself he keeps things relatively vague, and while I suppose the game designers thought that would keep him mysterious, it really just makes him appear dense and stupid. I am neither dense nor stupid, however, and as I said above I saw where the story was going long before the Prince did. But what made this interesting is that this lent the rest of the game this accidental air of tragic inevitability that I'm not sure it would have had if the Prince knew what I knew. Two of the biggest themes in the PoP series have been the notion of fate and the illusion of time, both of which also come into play in this game, and I must say I was actually somewhat moved by the game's ending, partially because the Prince stops being such a douchebag, but also because by the time he figured out what I already knew, he did something that I did not expect. The game is set up for at least one sequel (surprise!) but the ending is still very satisfying, and that's not something one sees very often.

(Spoilers over).

The short version is that the game has a decent story but a terrible script. I don't want my Prince to be all "cool" and modern and talking about girls and shit; there's absolutely no sense of time or place in this game, which I suppose would be more frustrating if the game lived or died by its story, which it does not. In any event, the Prince should not sound like he's on a TV show.

I think this review (or whatever this is) comes off as maybe a bit negative, which maybe isn't fair. Or accurate. I really was having fun for a significant portion of my time with it, and that's ultimately the most important thing. But it will not be in my Top 10 of 2008, and I think that's why I guess I'm a little disappointed with it.

Big announcement to come later today, possibly right after I finish posting this. It deserves its own post.

33, 40K

I am 33 years old today, and I broke the 40,000 Achievement Points threshold earlier this morning. I AM KING OF THE WORLD.

Prince of Persia "review" and GOTY posts are forthcoming, as well as a big announcement. For now, though, I am going to enjoy my cup of coffee and wait for my brain to get started; I had a Rock Band birthday party here yesterday and I'm still not fully coherent.

Prince of Douche

I got my hands on the new Prince of Persia today, and I played for about an hour or so. I love the new art direction.

Um.

The animations are beautiful, but the control doesn't feel quite right. But I can get used to that, I guess, after a few more hours.

BUT.

What the fuck is with this guy being a huge fucking douchebag? What the hell is with the writing in games these days?

The thing that made the Sands of Time game so great was its sense of time and place. The thing that makes this game so difficult to deal with is that it might as well be taking place right this very minute, and people today are fucking douchebags. There's no poetry or artful grace in this game; the Prince is a shmoe and Elika is, as all videogame females are, a mystery.

I mean, fuck - even the great Hot Chicks With Douchebags has figured it out.

Goddammit.

Zombies ZOMG

Zombies are the new Nazis.

Think about it. Nazis have been the de facto bad guys in popular culture for the last 50 years. They are a perfect enemy; nobody gets offended when you have to kill them. Castle Wolfenstein illustrated this in interactive 3D, and the videogame boom as we know it was born.

I think, however, that we've reached a point in our society where the evilness of Nazis has lost a bit of its power. The videogaming generation did not grow up in WW2, and neither did its parents. When you kill Nazis in videogames, you're not avenging the horrors of the Holocaust anymore, or freeing Europe from the tyrannical grips of a monster; you are killing bad guys in order to make it to the next checkpoint, and Nazis have always been an easy target for game designers because (a) you don't have to worry about cultural sensitivity issues, and (b) who doesn't enjoy killing Nazis? It's just that most WW2 games these days don't really focus on the why; they focus on the experience of the soldier in the middle of the battle, rather than the reason why the soldier is over there in the first place, and as a result, the enemy Nazi soldier is no longer as capital-E Evil because they all look the same and there's so damn many of them.

Enter the zombie.

Zombies have been around forever, but I would point to the 2002 film 28 Days Later as the source of the current zombie revival. (My own personal interest in the coming zombie apocalypse was not borne from movies but from Max Brooks, whose Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z made for highly engrossing and informative reading.) Danny Boyle's film reimagined zombies as less of a slow-moving, brainless dread and more of a HOLY SHIT IT'S COMING RIGHT AT ME AAAAAAAAAA horrorshow, and it seems to have struck quite a nerve; now there's zombie films and games all over the place. In fact, one need look no further than a bonus mode in Call of Duty: World At War to see the ultimate crossover - zombie Nazis.

I bring this up because I spent a highly entertaining hour yesterday with 2 close friends killing hundreds upon hundreds of zombies in Left 4 Dead, and it occured to me in the crazy dreams that ensued later that night that a zombie horde is, in 2008, a far more frightening prospect than a Nazi ambush. And it's also a much more fertile idea for game developers. Nazis can only exist in Europe in the 1940s; zombies can exist anywhere, at any time, and they don't need guns to kill you. They have no political agenda or ideology, they have no apologists, and they never run out of numbers. They can be fast or slow; they can be subhuman and superhuman. ALSO: they can be hilarious (Shaun of the Dead, FIDO).

I'm not saying that Nazis aren't evil; of course they're evil. I'm Jewish, fercrissakes, I'm not suggesting any such thing. I'm simply positing that there will eventually be more zombies than Nazis, and we should all prepare accordingly.

Good Times All Around

Last night was epic.

Last night was the sort of night that makes me seriously reconsider my pick for GOTY. As said previously, I'm refraining from doing the big GOTY post until after Prince of Persia arrives - I'm a huge fan of the series, and with all the positive reviews it's been getting, it could very well have an impact.* But as I've also said previously, I entered the 2008 stretch run still feeling confident in my GOTY choice.

I'm having some serious questions now.

Last night was a night spent with Rock Band 2 and Left 4 Dead.

Let me start with Rock Band 2. My wife and I have a band together: "Lilo and Two Poots", named after our two dogs and their farts. In this band, I play drums (on hard) and she plays guitar (on easy). We'd been hitting a wall in our tour progression, though - Medium is too hard for her on guitar, and there were a bunch of competitions that had Medium difficulty as the lowest available option. And so, as she was out of the house, I took it upon myself to pick up the guitar and plow through the stuff she couldn't do.

And, as a result, I ended up beating the game (I think). There was a 5-song set that we needed in order to open up some new venues, and then there was an 8-song set in Shanghai that would get us on the cover of Rolling Stone. After the RS show, I opened up every other venue in the world, and so obviously there's still a tremendous amount left to do, but the credits rolled anyway. Having only really played RB2 on the drums, it took me a little while to get used to playing guitar again, but I quickly got the hang of it, and I had a friggin' blast. There's so many great songs in that game, and all of the guitar parts are sensible. My biggest problem with Guitar Hero 3 was that the difficulty level often had nothing to do with the actual music that was being played; playing a song on Medium was often times harder than actually playing the actual song on an actual guitar. RB2 does not make that mistake at all - I did my guitar parts on both Hard and Expert last night and the difficulty was absolutely fair; if I screwed up, I knew it was my fault, and if I was able to get 4 or 5 stars at the end, I felt like I'd earned it.

And in the middle of this RB2 insanity, I played some Left 4 Dead with some good friends. We managed to get through an entire story (I can't remember what it's called off the top of my head, but it's the one that ends with the last stand at the boathouse). L4D might not be the most complete game package out there right now; it really just does one specific thing, though, and it does it exceedingly well. We were constantly keeping tabs on each other, racing in to fend off a Hunter on a downed teammate, calling out Boomers, making sure we all had our flashlights turned off if we heard a Witch, setting up gas can traps for oncoming horde assaults... and all the while, the excellent AI-controlled 4th member of our party was watching our 6, healing us when necessary, and never, ever getting in the way. The game is remarkable in its pacing, but also in terms of communication; the three of us were constantly talking to each other, but then (also) our in-game characters would chime in with situationally-appropriate comments which often cracked us up. Not to mention, we all scored a number of Achievements as we progressed, most of which were pretty cool and not really things we were consciously aiming for.

This is a long way of saying that RB2 and L4D are now firmly entrenched in my top 5 of 2008, which is getting more and more crowded with every passing day.



*According to Amazon, I won't be getting my grubby little mitts on PoP until Friday, the 5th.

The 2009 Lust List

I haven't even started my 2008 GOTY post and yet here I am working on a 2009 Lust List. Blame it on Prince of Persia, which arrives later this week (and which is already starting to get some decent reviews). And blame it on my own avoidance of World of Goo, which I finally Steam'd last night; it had been getting all sorts of fawning adulation for months and I could no longer ignore its siren call. And I can't very well hand Braid an indie award without at least trying WoG.

Nevertheless. We are in December of 2008, which means that 2009 is nearly upon us. And as such, it would behoove us to figure out how we're going to be spending our money (and/or divvying up our rental queue real estate). 2007 set an insanely high standard in terms of AAA titles, and while it could be argued that 2008 may not have exactly equalled it in that regard, it was no slouch. So, then: what can we reasonably expect from 2009?

Unfortunately, it's difficult for me, an industry outsider, to say. If one were to only peruse Gamestop's release calendars (as I did), one would never see such heavy hitters as Heavy Rain, Alan Wake, Brutal Legend, The Witcher, and Uncharted 2 (the last 2 being sort-of announced just this morning). 1UP is running a Games of 2009 feature this month, but they're only doing one game per day; I'm sure the other big sites will run similar features as well.

That said, I've done what I can, and what follows is a pretty good idea of what's happening for (at least) the first half of 2009.

JANUARY

• LOTR: Conquest (multi). I'm hedging my bets on this Battlefront-in-LOTR title, but you never know.
• Peggle (DS). Never mind that it's been on the PC since last year; it's Peggle on the DS!
  
• Star Ocean (PSP). Gamestop lists maybe 5 titles for the PSP coming out in 2009; this is one of two that I was curious about. If it turns out to be a strategy JRPG, though, it's off the list; I do not care for that particular subgenre one bit.

FEBRUARY

• Halo Wars (360). My appetite for strategy titles was born purely out of my intense (but brief) love affair with Civ Rev this past summer; Halo Wars is not Civ Rev. And I really don't care all that much about the Halo universe. But this looks to be a quality title, and it will probably be a cold winter.
• Killzone 2 (PS3). As far as I'm concerned, this is the most important PS3 title of the first half of 2009. Early reports from the Beta are very promising.
  
• Splinter Cell: Conviction (multi). I was unaware that this was back on track, but Gamestop lists it as coming out on 2/2/09, which seems awfully soon for a title so riddled with development problems. I am crossing my fingers but not expecting very much, which is kind of sad.
• Sonic - Ultimate Genesis Collection (multi). Self-explanatory. I've always been a Sega Genesis fanboy, and I probably already own too many of these games as XBLA releases to justify purchasing it, but, well, if you haven't figured out that I'm a total whore by now, you haven't been paying attention.
• Street Figher 4 (multi). I haven't bought a fighting game since... Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast. I am inexplicably excited for this one, though.
• Godfather 2 (multi). It's blasphemy that they're making yet another game out of the greatest movies ever made, but at least they're shooting high with this one. It remains to be seen how all the different elements of the game will play out, or if the game even needs the Godfather IP to be successful. I'm moderately intrigued, which makes me nauseous even just typing.
• DragonQuest 5 (DS)
• PuzzleQuest Galactrix (DS)
• Damnation (multi)
  

MARCH

• Chronicles of Riddick (multi). I loved the hell out of it on the Xbox and I will love it again.
• Resident Evil 5 (multi). I'm not entirely sure how excited I'm going to be for this one. I only ever played the first 20 minutes of RE4 on the Wii and fucking hated it, which makes me one of the only people on Earth to think so.
• MadWorld (Wii). I have been avoiding coverage of this title for some bizarre reason; everyone seems to think it's going to be totally insane. Maybe it's because it makes me think of No More Heroes, which I never got into.
• Henry Hatsworth and the Puzzling Adventure (DS)
  
• Alpha Protocol (multi)
• Phantasy Star Portable (PSP)
• Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. (multi)
• Star Ocean: The Last Hope (360)
• Broken Sword (Wii)
  
• Scrabble (DS)

APRIL AND BEYOND

• Fuel (multi). I loved Codemaster's DiRT but was disappointed in GRiD. I saw some previews for this a little while ago and it looked absolutely insane.
• Ghostbusters (multi). I'm a little concerned by all the publishing drama it's gone through, and it's probably going to suck. But still. It's Ghostbusters. With (mostly) the original cast, writing their own lines. At the very least, it should be good for a few laughs.
• Heavy Rain (PS3). I have been told by those in the know that this is going to be 2009's GOTY.
  
• God of War 3 (PS3). I'm embarassed to admit that my first GoW game was the PSP title released earlier this year; I have to imagine that this title is going to be ridiculous.
  
• Alan Wake (360). If this game doesn't get released this year, I will probably stop caring about it.
  
• Final Fantasy XIII (multi). This will be my first FF game. Not sure which platform I'll play it on; if the Achievements are to be as esoteric and impossible as they were for FFXI, I'll play it on the PS3 (which is supposedly the lead development platform, anyway).
• Brutal Legend (multi). Oh please oh please oh please.
• The Conduit (Wii). Yet another Wii game that I'm strangely ambivilent about.
• The Agency (PS3)
• Just Cause 2 (multi)
• Bayonetta (multi)
• Dragon Age Origins (multi)
• Uncharted 2 (PS3)
• The Witcher (multi)
• Duke Nukem Forever (multi). A boy can dream.
  

Decembering

Some quick hits as we enter December:

• Maybe getting up to 40K by the end of the year isn't totally far-fetched. I've got less than 900 points to go, and plenty of Fallout 3 and the forthcoming Prince of Persia to go through, as well as giving Dead Space another, proper go; I suppose I could always try to finish up what's left in Tomb Raider Underworld, if things got really out of hand...

• Speaking of reaching the end of the year, I'm really just waiting for Prince of Persia to come out before I make my big GOTY post; I don't necessarily think PoP will impact my top 10 one way or the other, but you never know. And I'd love to be wrong about PoP.

• I finished Tomb Raider over the weekend; as I'd guessed, I wasn't that far off from the end, although I was a bit surprised at how abrupt the end actually turned out. Perhaps my expectations were unrealistically high, but I was pretty disappointed; the game has certain high points but for the most part it feels lazy and uninspired. Supposedly there is 360-exclusive DLC coming up, so I guess I will hold on to my copy for the time being; I would imagine it'll be a bonus level or two (possibly even the Croft Manor puzzle level that's been a favorite of mine in the last two installments).
  

• I've only played the first 10 minutes of Chrono Trigger for the DS, which is probably why I'm failing to see this as the greatest RPG of all time.

• My brother got me the Wii Classic Controller as an early birthday/holiday present. I mention this because having the Classic Controller has finally gotten me excited about owning a Wii again - I'm going to go download Ocarina of Time and Donkey Kong Country. And I think that pretty much says it all, in terms of the state of the Wii this year.

• I was at a Best Buy on Black Friday - in the afternoon - and the scene was decidedly non-hysterical; indeed, you'd almost never know what day it was if not for various sale-related posters. Anyway, my inability to find a Blackberry Storm very nearly resulted in me getting an iPhone, but cooler heads prevailed, and I was actually able to find and buy a Storm last night in NYC. So far I'm relatively pleased with it; it does the things I want it to do, at any rate. That said:

1. The contact list is ugly and could use a re-design.
   
2. The interface in general is sluggish, although this is supposedly being addressed in an upcoming software update.
3. There isn't a tremendous amount of apps to use, nor is there a store (that I can find, at any rate) to buy games. It's not a dealbreaker, but having solitaire or sudoku on the go is always handy.

Stay tuned for the forthcoming GOTY post, which will be a doozy.