Review of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
In between sessions of writing and revising Eyes in the Shadow, I had a chance to play Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. This computer game came with my new video card, and it is actually a lot of fun. Yes, yes, I could have spent this time blogging instead, but in my defense, it was a really short game, only taking 12 hours or so to finish. At one point in time this would have annoyed me, but as I have a lot less time to play computer games these days, 12 hours is the perfect length for a diversionary game to not take too much of a chunk out of my life.
Prince of Persia is actually a very old computer game series which began life as a side-scroller. It combined lots of jumping over pits and avoiding traps with the occasional sword fight. Sands of Time is a 3d game involving pretty much the same thing. However, as a modern 3d game, the prince has all sorts of new, fancy moves, such as running along walls, leaping over enemies, and bouncing off of walls, but the central theme of the game is still figuring out how to get from point A to point B, which happens to be five stories up on the other side of a ravine. To get there you may swing on a rope across the ravine to land on a ledge which you inch along until you can run along the wall until you reach a horizontal pole, which you swing on to leap to another pole, so you can shimmy up a ladder, etc. And if you misestimate a distance or mistime a leap, you fall to your death. Sometimes all this jumping and climbing is interrupted by a trap--such as a spinning sword or a buzzsaw that moves up and down the wall, or a switch you have to press which opens a door for a few seconds, or most often both, so that you have to have perfect timing. Combine this with the fact that you can only save in certain locations, and it sounds pretty unforgiving. Which it would be if not for a couple of things working in your favor. First, the controls are not too picky, and you don't have to be in exactly the right position in order to make a jump or start running along a wall. And second, early on in the game you pick up the Dagger of Time. (Shortly afterwards the Sands of Time are let loose, turning pretty much everyone into zombies, who are the main enemies in this game, but I'll get to that later.) This artifact has a number of amazing powers, and the one you'll use most often is the power to rewind time. If you mistime and run into a buzzsaw, knocking you off your perch and sending you falling to your death, simply hit the "R" key and hold and you'll rewind a few seconds--I think it's about 30--so you can correct your mistake. This is useful in fights, too, as if you're knocked down with four of the zombie creatures trying to kill you, they'll hit you again and again before you can manage to get to your feet, so you might want to rewind in order to avoid being knocked down in the first place. The dagger has other powers, such as the ability to slow time down, to freeze your enemies, and the mega-freeze ability, which freezes all your enemies so you can kill them at your leisure. These abilities don't come free--the dagger has a number of tanks which you must fill with the Sands of Time, and using these abilities can consume one or more of the tanks. Fortunately, Sand is easy to come by. Every time you kill an enemy, you can take his Sand. In fact, you need to do so, or he'll come back to life. In addition, there are plentiful deposits of Sand just lying about that will fill the all the sand tanks. It was rare that I ran low on sand, although it did happen.
This game isn't without it's difficulties. The limited ability to save games was annoying. Not so much for the dying and losing your progress problem, as the Dagger helped there, and even when you did die with no Sand in your dagger, you could retry it from a fairly recent point. But sometimes I'd be up against a fight I'd tried three times and lost three times, and I just wanted to quit for the night, but I knew that if I did I'd have to go through everything I'd done since the last save, including a really annoying trap sequence, since that's where the last save was. Also annoying is the camera control. The game is third person 3D, but unlike most games of this type that use a locked over-the-shoulder camera, in this game you control the camera independently of the character. However, the movement keys are relative to the camera, so pressing the same key may cause the prince to take a step forwards or backwards depending on which way the camera's pointing. This wouldn't be so bad if you didn't occasionally run into situations where you could not look at the scene from the angle you really needed, since the camera kept bouncing up against the wall. Once or twice I had trouble getting him to move in the direction I wanted, and the lack of my desired camera angle sometimes meant that I just couldn't get the perspective to tell whether I could make a jump or not, so I just took a leap of faith. Sometimes I made it and sometimes I didn't.
Despite the gripes, it's a fun game overall. I wouldn't pay a lot of money for it (I got it for free), but as it's pretty old now, you can probably pick it up for $20 or so. Here for instance.
Prince of Persia is actually a very old computer game series which began life as a side-scroller. It combined lots of jumping over pits and avoiding traps with the occasional sword fight. Sands of Time is a 3d game involving pretty much the same thing. However, as a modern 3d game, the prince has all sorts of new, fancy moves, such as running along walls, leaping over enemies, and bouncing off of walls, but the central theme of the game is still figuring out how to get from point A to point B, which happens to be five stories up on the other side of a ravine. To get there you may swing on a rope across the ravine to land on a ledge which you inch along until you can run along the wall until you reach a horizontal pole, which you swing on to leap to another pole, so you can shimmy up a ladder, etc. And if you misestimate a distance or mistime a leap, you fall to your death. Sometimes all this jumping and climbing is interrupted by a trap--such as a spinning sword or a buzzsaw that moves up and down the wall, or a switch you have to press which opens a door for a few seconds, or most often both, so that you have to have perfect timing. Combine this with the fact that you can only save in certain locations, and it sounds pretty unforgiving. Which it would be if not for a couple of things working in your favor. First, the controls are not too picky, and you don't have to be in exactly the right position in order to make a jump or start running along a wall. And second, early on in the game you pick up the Dagger of Time. (Shortly afterwards the Sands of Time are let loose, turning pretty much everyone into zombies, who are the main enemies in this game, but I'll get to that later.) This artifact has a number of amazing powers, and the one you'll use most often is the power to rewind time. If you mistime and run into a buzzsaw, knocking you off your perch and sending you falling to your death, simply hit the "R" key and hold and you'll rewind a few seconds--I think it's about 30--so you can correct your mistake. This is useful in fights, too, as if you're knocked down with four of the zombie creatures trying to kill you, they'll hit you again and again before you can manage to get to your feet, so you might want to rewind in order to avoid being knocked down in the first place. The dagger has other powers, such as the ability to slow time down, to freeze your enemies, and the mega-freeze ability, which freezes all your enemies so you can kill them at your leisure. These abilities don't come free--the dagger has a number of tanks which you must fill with the Sands of Time, and using these abilities can consume one or more of the tanks. Fortunately, Sand is easy to come by. Every time you kill an enemy, you can take his Sand. In fact, you need to do so, or he'll come back to life. In addition, there are plentiful deposits of Sand just lying about that will fill the all the sand tanks. It was rare that I ran low on sand, although it did happen.
This game isn't without it's difficulties. The limited ability to save games was annoying. Not so much for the dying and losing your progress problem, as the Dagger helped there, and even when you did die with no Sand in your dagger, you could retry it from a fairly recent point. But sometimes I'd be up against a fight I'd tried three times and lost three times, and I just wanted to quit for the night, but I knew that if I did I'd have to go through everything I'd done since the last save, including a really annoying trap sequence, since that's where the last save was. Also annoying is the camera control. The game is third person 3D, but unlike most games of this type that use a locked over-the-shoulder camera, in this game you control the camera independently of the character. However, the movement keys are relative to the camera, so pressing the same key may cause the prince to take a step forwards or backwards depending on which way the camera's pointing. This wouldn't be so bad if you didn't occasionally run into situations where you could not look at the scene from the angle you really needed, since the camera kept bouncing up against the wall. Once or twice I had trouble getting him to move in the direction I wanted, and the lack of my desired camera angle sometimes meant that I just couldn't get the perspective to tell whether I could make a jump or not, so I just took a leap of faith. Sometimes I made it and sometimes I didn't.
Despite the gripes, it's a fun game overall. I wouldn't pay a lot of money for it (I got it for free), but as it's pretty old now, you can probably pick it up for $20 or so. Here for instance.
