Game Review: Prince of Persia

To be honest, I had never played a Prince of Persia game, on any system, until I picked up the most recent rendition for the Xbox 360. Not entirely sure what to expect (oh, another adventure game, I had told myself), I jumped into the game without much more thought than that. It only took the first ten minutes of the game, or rather, the excellently integrated beginner's tutorial, to utterly captivate me; both as a game player, and as a person who likes to watch awesomeness unfold before them.

As you begin the game, the main character, Prince, is wandering a desert looking for his lost donkey. A few seconds later, he's chasing after a beautiful princess who is a bit irritated with her father for having released a dark god of doom and destruction upon the world. This instant jump into the action is what a player can expect from the game: a narrative that does not take a break for a second.

To start, the artwork in this game is simply incredible. Yeah, fancy graphics have become old news in the game industry, especially in this latest console generation. But there is something about Prince of Persia's art style that truly captivates. I have never been a gamer who stops to gaze out over a video game's pixilated horizon; but in Prince of Persia, you really can't help yourself. Some of the more expansive views look straight out of 1001 Arabian Nights.



Yet while graphics can "wow" me, as a gamer, it all comes down to the gameplay, and Prince of Persia is one of the most "playable" platformers on the market. Most of your jumps, grabs, and gravity-defying ceiling crawls are executed by one push of a button. In most cases, your movement joystick is only needed to point the Prince in the right direction for the first jump, and then the rest of the platforming sequence is just a timed sequence of button presses. Incredibly simplistic: yes. But the Prince looks so awesome doing it, I didn't much care it was so easy to do such awesome looking stuff: wall running across a thousand foot chasm, navigating a broken bridge across a mountainous abyss, it all looks great, feels great; but it can't really be called challenging.

Should you ever find yourself plummeting helplessly into some crevice, and you will, you'll find the game's "death" system refreshingly forgiving. Your partner throughout the game, the Princess Elika, will use her teleportation magic to grab your hand and plop you back on the platform you just left. As a gamer, you know you just "died", but the game doesn't punish you by forcing you to a loading screen, nor does it give you a limited number of lives to work with. Elika never gets tired of saving you, and I appreciated how this system kept the game flowing smoothly. You won't be kicked out of the story to a loud "Prince? Prince! PRIIINCE!", followed by an agonizingly long load screen that gives you time to strew in your own failure.

The combat is almost as simplistic as the jumping around. The only addition is the Prince's ability to block and riposte attacks. Fights are always a one-on-one duel, and players can effortlessly chain together some visually stunning combos. Like in the platforming sections, being defeated simply means Elika will use her magic to save you, and you are punished slightly by the enemy regaining a portion of its health, but the battle continues regardless. This portion of the game can be frustrating, especially as the enemies increase in difficulty near the end of the story.



You'll find that the enemies don't have to follow the same rules you do. If they riposte one of your attacks, you better start blocking because that counterattack is going to be faster than your next attack could ever be. However, if you riposte one of your enemy's attacks and try to counterattack, more often than not you'll be on the ground, bleeding, wondering what happened. Combat momentum NEVER works in the player's favor, and this can make for player frustration. Yet as combat is really a small portion of the game, this issue can not ruin, nor even really mar, a great gaming experience.

As a cherry-on-top, the dialogue between the Prince and Princess is actually quite good, even laugh-out-loud worthy at some points. The development between the two characters adds a sense of life to the otherwise dull, evil-god-is-escaping-his-prison plot line.

In the end, Prince of Persia is a game that gamers should treat themselves to playing. Is the story long enough to validate a $60 price tag? No, I would say not. But in the case of a rental or a $20 used game, you really won't find more bang for your buck anywhere in the game industry.

MY MMORPG HISTORY

"Time you enjoy wasting is not time wasted." John Lennon

This quote gives me solace when I think back to all the days, literally days, I have spent playing MMORPGs. Is this not time that would have been better spent in the real world? Playing sports, learning about girls at an earlier age, being popular, building important memories, blah blah blah.

I don't know. But I have fond memories of online friends (people I never met in real life), so even though we never met face-to-face, is that interaction be any less real? I don't think so. And MMORPGs are like never-ending books you write every day, so is it any less stimulating to the mind in terms of imagination? Or what about the planning of actions, map reading skills, and tactical exercises these games bombard our brains with on a daily basis? Surely, this must at least be a passing aid to cerebral development?

Yet this blog isn't about validating one of my hobbies to other people, it’s about looking back on all the different games I have played and my most vivid memories of the same. So let's get started!

My first game was Everquest. I remember seeing a commercial for it in the previews for some movie I saw in the theatre. I don't remember which one. Or perhaps it was on TV? Anyway, I decided to use the last of my birthday money to buy the game and then negotiate with my parents that instead of giving me 15$ to mow the lawn every two weeks, they simply pay for my monthly subscription to the game.

I remember the box was vanilla Everquest, and I made a human paladin in the city of Qeynos. That sealed my fate to Sony Online Entertainment for about a year. I remember once falling into the water of the Gnoll lair outside Qeynos, and asking some level 20 Erudite paladin to rescue my stuff by dragging my corpse back to the beginning of the zone (which was worth next to nothing, but at that point, 5 platinum of gear was a fortune to me.)

This was necessary because all of your gear remained on your corpse after you respawned, and it was always a dangerous prospect to go back and get your gear. After all, whatever killed you is probably still there, or there are respawned enemies between you and your corpse; and now you are naked. If you didn’t get back eventually, all your stuff would vanish with your corpse. When in dungeons, it often became necessary to abandon the spawn you were camping to fight your way to the site of an unfortunate massacre of other players, and then to drag the maimed bodies back to the entrance of the dungeon. You were often tipped for this, and it was a great way to win respect and friendship. After all, your group could be the next one to wipe
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I also remember the dawn of the religion based PvP servers, where the forces of Good, Evil, and Neutral were all opposed to each other. I was on the force of good. I found this fun because it forced everyone to level in zones that were in their factions "territory," and these were often places that most of the game population had forgotten and never used anymore. I remember sitting for hours with a guild group in the goblin ice castle waiting for some goblin to spawn that dropped something cool. It was across the frozen wastes from the Barbarian capital.

I remember "training," when a careless party member accidently attracted more monsters than he could handle and the entire group would be forced to run to the entrance of the zone to remove agro. The zone border is where people would gather to look for groups, and when someone shouted “TRAIN!!!” over the general chat you made sure to get the hell out of the way. Death actually lost you experience, so being mobbed by a bunch of monsters when you are just sitting around was bad news. Those were days of pain.

I don’t remember the name of our guild, but I was a druid named Raks Toolazytoportyou/Nosowforu. (SOW being Spirit of Wolf, a movement speed buff, which everyone would ask druids for because walking was generally the only way to get anywhere.) Altogether, Everquest was an unfriendly game, but that seemed to create a great community of dedicated players.

Then a friend in high school, also an Everquest player, introduced me to Ultima Online. A strange top-down 2D game where there were no classes but skills. I just remember a lot of mining and running around killing wildlife. The lack of a specific goal left me in the dark. I think I was too young to appreciate the game.  I didn’t spend much time there. I remember reading descriptions of the professions people made up by combining different skills. For some reason, I chose wrestling, and I spent a few hours wrestling stray dogs on the starting island. Then a veteran player wandered by and said, “You know, a sword will help you kill things faster.” Sure enough, I bought a cheap sword and then killed a dog in about 1/10th the time. My days as a wrestler were over.

I think Ultima is a great design for a sandbox type game, but now that I am old enough to appreciate it, I can’t handle the archaic graphics. It was a game before my time, I suppose.

Around this time, there was a game called Allegiance. It was not an MMORPG, but it was cool enough to be worth mentioning. It was a space arcade shooter and an RTS. It was basically Savage but with Wing Commander. You played with a flight-sim joystick. Remember when people actually used those? All the players would be pilots, and there would be one commander. The commander would build the bases and upgrades his pilots wanted, and he could view a tactical map to see what was going on amongst the various systems in the game. In the early part of the game, you flew a scout to find the asteroids to harvest for money, places to build new space stations for upgraded ships, and to drop probes that would alert your commander to intrusions by the enemy.

At mid game, both teams would usually create bombers. The basic bombers had one pilot and no real defenses, so a wing of fighters and a few scouts with repair guns would escort it towards an enemy base. Fighters would move through wormholes first, clear enemy probes, and then call the bomber through. Sooner or later though, the enemy fighters would come roaring in to stop you. Players also needed to defend the automated harvester vessel (think the tiberium harvester in C&C): this was dull but important work. It was hair-raising as the defending side of one of these attacks, too. The commander would turn on the klaxons “Enemy Bomber Sighted! Sector X-31!” Wherever you were, you would turn your ship around and full afterburner into a starbase, transfer to that sector, and scramble another fighter to meet the attack before the bomber reached missile range.

In the late game, teams would construct capital ships. These ships had turret positions, so not only were they supported by flights of fighters, players were also manning the machine gun turrets to fight off the inevitable enemy counter-attack.

While not an MMO, Allegiance is still one of the coolest games I have played in my entire life. It’s too bad the game died out because of a lack of population. I think it is ready for a revival. I would play it again in an instant.

The next game I tried was the fledgling Anarchy Online. It introduced a number of mechanics to the MMORPG genre that became tropes. The random mission generator was a cool new feature, and the less painful method of death (your stuff stayed with you!) The futurist dystopia feel of the game was the first of its kind. Plus, I enjoyed the novelty of shooting things with laser guns as a change from smacking things with swords.

I remember the fun of doing the private instanced missions with small groups. There was something satisfying about turning the corner into a bunch of radioactive monsters and blasting them to hell with a barrage of laser fire. Gear upgrades were easy to get, and they made highly noticeable changes to the way your character looked. I might have played this game longer, but then the only rival to my current love for World of Warcraft arrived:

DARK AGE OF CAMELOT

This game was amazing. It featured Northern European mythology (my favorite subject,) three diverse factions (Arthurian, Celtic, and Norse,)  conquest-based PvP (you could attack castles within a Battleground type structure or out in the main world and control keeps and relics that benefitted your entire nation,) and fun dungeon experiences.  I bounced around the classes and realms for a while, as I was apt to do, but I eventually settled in on a Troll Warrior named Ziv.

Every time I reached the top of a new Battle Grounds bracket, I would deck myself out in the best crafted armor (trade skills were hard but rewarding), dye it some ominous color (you could dye all your armor pieces for complete customization,) and then charge into enemy groups and chop people in half with a massive axe. The PvP was fun, if a bit of a zerg fest. However playing the insane berserking warrior that was the first to charge into battle was a good time.

At mid-high levels, you would venture outside the realm gates into the contested territories to level. It was always a tense experience, because archers from the other realms liked to stealth through the trees and hit you with huge critical hits before you even knew they were there. Your group would be fighting some spriggarn and then your healer would be dead with an arrow in his back. Bad news.

Dark Age introduced world PvP that was more than a gimmick, and it managed three diverse factions. It also created an interesting twist on the corpse retrieval affair in Everquest. Instead of going back for your gear, you went back to your gravestone that appeared where you met your unfortunate end. By praying at your grave, you regain most of the experience you lost when you died. If there was a server playing vanilla Dark Age of Camelot with a good population, I would go back right now.

After DAOC, I had a brief affair with the ill-fated junior version of E.V.E. Online, Earth and Beyon:. A sci-fi MMO wherein you flew around in spaceships and leveled up. I don’t remember much of this game, other than it was my first attempt to start a guild. I was perhaps 14, but built up a guild of around 40 active members and this kept my attention for maybe two or three months. I eventually passed leadership to someone else when I got bored with the game. I don’t remember much about that guild though.

Oh, well. Outside designing your own ship’s colors, there really wasn’t much happening in that game. Probably why it survived for perhaps six months? Still, it was the first MMORPG to attempt the Z-axis.

Then Star Wars Galaxies was on the scene. My dreams of becoming a Jedi or a Stormtrooper were instantly dashed, like so many others, when inexplicably the game designers made these things nearly impossible to achieve. A convoluted class system, a boring mission system that was less fun and interesting than Anarchy Online’s older model, and pointless stat recovery mechanics made this game a total flop. But I was an avid Star Wars Fan, so I enjoyed making new characters all over the place.

 I think I had the most fun being a Musician. This meant I sat in a wretched hive of scum and villainy and pushed a few hotkeys while slowly collecting experience. But other musicians and dancers were there, and I spent many an hour chatting away with people while not really doing much of anything. Once this finally got boring, there was no further reason to play the game. Man, I still can’t believe what a disappointment that game was.

After this, I bought a non-MMO game called Neverwinter Nights. And after getting bored with the single player rather quickly, I discovered there were mini-MMO servers called Persistent Worlds that players created for the game. I became engrossed with a roleplaying world named Brynsaar, and I think I played there steadily for perhaps two or three years.

I still remember tons of moments from that community, and I hope I can find them again now that I think of it. My character was William Aquas, and he was a roguish pirate not unlike Captain Jack Sparrow (but I created William Aquas and was roleplaying him for several months before that movie came out >.<)

Back on the MMO front, I drifted between a few of the games I already played for a while, and then I purchased City of Heroes. Since I have a horrible addiction to making alternate characters, this game was sort of like a drug to me. My creativity, my short attention span, and love of comic books combined together to ensure I spent nearly twice as much time in the character creator as I did in the actual game. Though I still remember my first (and best creation) The Orange Shadow! A mystical ninja or shadow power and Snake-Eyes-like physical dexterity. But then the sheer monotony of the combat really wore me down. I didn’t play this game for longer than a month or two.

City of Heroes was still innovative on several fronts. It was the first superhero MMO, and it introduced the idea of experience debt rather than experience loss. You would not lose anything after death, but half of your experience would go to pay off your debt. Thus you would level a bit slowly for a while, but at least you did not lost anything.

About this time, the long awaited World of Warcraft came out, and for some reason, I didn’t enjoy the beta. I don’t really remember why. So I bought Everquest 2 instead. Not really sure why, either. It was basically the same game as the first Everquest, but you could actually solo most of the way up the level chain. The graphics were pretty nice looking, too; for the time. I don’t think I had any fun with this game though, and I don’t think I made it past the trial week.

After that flop, I went to Guild Wars. I could never get into this game. The instances zones ensured I was always alone, and I felt like nothing I did “mattered.” I didn’t play this game for long.

Then I went to City of Villains, the sort of expansion/sequel to City of Heroes. Again, I spent all my time in the character creator and almost none of my time in the actually game (which was just as boring as it was when it was called City of Heroes. It was here I realized that NCSoft simply re-skins City of Heroes to create every game they release.

I tried E.V.E. online, but the progression system seemed so daunting in the chronological fashion that I couldn’t see the point in continuing. My character advances when I don’t play? At first I thought this was great because I was never really addicted to playing the game. Then after a while, I realized all I was doing was perhaps running one mission, getting bored, and then queuing up my skills for the next day. I was paying to play a game in which not-playing was more fun than actually playing. Why? Cancelled.

Finally. Finally! I joined World of Warcraft on the eve of Burning Crusade. The expansion was filling the gaming sites with impressive preview articles, and most of the gaming community was generally impressed with the game. Why not see what everyone is yapping about? I am still playing WoW today; though our history together is an off-again-on-again relationship.

I had the most fun on the Moon Guard sever. There was, and still is, a rich roleplaying community there. I finally made it to cap level in an MMO for the first time in my life with my level 70 Rogue. Then I got bored.
Call of Duty and Halo 3 took my attention from my computer for about six months. Then, for some reason, I tried Star Trek Online. I cannot explain why. I predicted it would be terrible because City of Heroes and City of Villains were not great games and this was the same company. I read previews that more or less confirmed my predictions on what the game would be like (a soulless web of instanced zones.) 

However, I bought it anyway because the ship based combat system looked like it could become incredibly tactical, especially for PvP. But the game shipped half-finished. The Klingon side of the game being incredibly empty, and the ground combat was a simple re-skin of City of Heroes. In fact, most of Star Trek Online is a re-skinned version of the tech hiding behind the heroes and villains of NCSoft’s superhero franchises. You can see the City of Heroes UI peeking out everywhere.  It sickened me. Nothing past the trial month for me, and it still felt like I wasted money.

Presently, I am playing World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. The new leveling experience from 1-60 is awesome, and I am spending all my time making new characters and exploring all the changed zones. I have yet to even visit the new zones for 80-85, and I am not in a real rush. The play experience after level-cap was always responsible for me cancelling my account anyway. If they would make arenas available with standardized equipment, where everyone was wearing the same stuff (or level of stuff but with room for some customization,) the game would be perfect.

There you go for those who are still here. My entire life of MMORPGs. Thanks for reading.

WOW Cataclysm Zone Review: Westfall

The golden hills of Westfall, easily remembered for an atmosphere of agricultural dystopia, did not take any steps on the road to improvement. If you are a farmer, anyway. However, the new adventurer will find themselves in a strange allusion to the modern American setting: an economy in downturn, an increase of the homeless and the helpless, and new sparks of rage, rebellion, and vengeance against an emotionless institution. Like the landscape, the very psychology of the populace is sundered by Cataclysm.

The zone’s quests are mostly new with a few changes to the quest texts of some old favorites, but the inclusion of new NPCs is perhaps the best addition to the zone. Especially the CSI: Miami inspired detective Horatio Laine. He welcomes the player into the zone with the beginnings of a murder investigation, delivering signature dead-pan lines and putting his sunglasses on in tension-building ways. The NPCs you meet along the way do a great job of evoking a social understanding of Westfall: Upon the death of a hostile hobo, children run up to steal his shoes and other petty possessions. The only negative is that the “unknown” enemy organization is obvious from the beginning.

The environment changed significantly, too. One of the farms is a giant sinkhole, accompanied by a raging vortex. Yet it is odd that this impressive looking set-piece is not a factor in any of the region’s quests. Only a minor collection quest is offered by a ghost pirate, but he does not seem informed about the significance of the place. Sentinel Hill is sporting a new unfinished wall, and then mans the two “gates” with guards to keep out the hobos. This is odd because even the gnolls have enough imagination to realize that any of the many gaps in the unfinished wall can function in the same manner as a gate. While these savage imbeciles manage daring raids into the supplies of the Stormwind Army, the poor folk are stymied by their tradition of only entering fortresses through doors. Perhaps it is a devious jibe at the intelligence of the homeless?

The zone of Westfall is another victory for the Cataclysm redesign team. The only thing that brings down such a good zone like Westfall is the speedy experience game at the lower levels. By the time you finish half the quests in a zone, they lack challenge for the player. Throw in a dungeon or two, and before you reach the climax of the storyline you are looking to the next zone for adventure. Though as a completionist, it won’t stop me!

WOW Cataclysm Zone Review: Elwynn Forest

The forest has changed little. A few quests are new, but none of them are memorable. I think they make you go kill a guy?

A disappointing zone.