Well, I'm about 80% of the way through Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
... and my wrists are killing me.
Summary: Fun, but frustrating, and the interface is too slow. Plenty of bugs, but not any that I've noticed which interfere with game play.
The familiar PoP elements are there - the Prince, dubbed Tim, runs, jumps, sneaks, rolls, swings, and sprints up walls. Oh, and lots of sword play. And a variety of mechanical puzzles, solved by Tim and the sultan's daughter (who, thus far is an NPC). One disappointment - our old friend the collapsing floor is normally only an obstacle, rather than a trap.
Tim's tracking down a magical hour glass, which offers a number of useful bits without stretching mimesis too far. Because you are carrying a magic time dagger (found in an early level), you have, among other magics, a "do over" button of sorts. Also, at the various save points Tim is subject to visions, which foreshadow the next set of puzzles. There are waypoints between the save points, so if you have to start an episode again you don't go all the way back to the last save point, but you do have to keep playing if you don't want to lose intermediate progress. When the game saves, it is listed with a progress estimate (the last I saw was 81%, roughly 10 "game hours").
The path is taking you through the defense systems of the castle - providing a context for the various traps - the doors are only open when the traps are running. NPC Sultana does her bit on the two person sequences without prompting (if she's there: I got into a state where I could see her, and she was talking and responding to my work, but was actually three screens back, having failed to follow me on a climb).
Fighting beasts is pretty straight forward: swing at critters until critters are gone. Fighting the undead is a pain. You find out fairly quickly what the odds are - if there are five or six combatants then that's how many you will face until you are done, but how many times you will have to destroy each of them isn't clear. Or perhaps there are just waves of them, but you can't tell how many waves there are going to be. So there's no sense of progress until the fight is finished.
Healing water, and "do over" powerups are plentiful, and most combat is followed by a save point (so far). So you are really only in serious trouble if you get sloppy in the traps right before combat. Getting water in combat requires putting away your sword, which is difficult, but not impossible. It helps a lot to figure out that holding down the drink button is "drink continuously".
Five or six flavors of badguy thus far (only one non generic Boss badguy); Slash-parry-stab works with all of them; and Tim has a couple bonus attacks that work on some of them (the nastier undead have resistance to one type of attack).
Tim is a chauvanist pig. For me, this was just an irritatingly poor choice of "character development". I expect others to be most put out.
Major gripe number one: the game has a lot of down time. If you die, and are in bad enough shape that the do over isn't going to help: you wait for the do over to expire, then for the screen to transition to a resume quit screen, then you likely get the scene intro played again (I eventually learned spacebar shorts this). Want to go back to the last save point, to replay a vision? Stop, go to menu. Confirm. Menu flashes back, then another menu. Choose load, choose which to load. Load it. Jump into save point. Choose from menu, get your payoff, choose from the menu again, wait for Tim to recover from the effect of the vision.
Major gripe number two: viewpoint. You have three: a landscape view - occassionally useful for spotting a nearby ledge; A first person view, which offers the best possibilities for scanning up and down; and a third person behind the prince view, which is your default. As far as I can tell, you can't do anything but look in the default views, which is fine. What isn't fine is how awkward third person view is - seeing where you are going requires getting the camera behind the prince's head, which is often difficult because of walls and other obstacles.
This is especially irritating, because the keyboard movements - forward back left right - are taken from the perspective of the camera, most of the time. So to comfortably move a particular way, you need to face the appropriate direction. Of course, that isn't always enough - the directions you perceive and the directions the keys actually move you aren't always in agreement. Good luck. Some of the time limitted puzzles call for very precise coordination, which isn't easy on my setup (for whatever reason).
Gripe 3: combat. The movement relative to viewpoint thing is a major pain. Very subtle movements of the mouse change the viewpoint, and therefore the direction you move in combat. Furthermore, a number of Tim's special attacks change the camera angle as a side effect - combat feels fast enough that you don't have time to cope. The feel comes, in large part, from the shifting angles - producing more of an "in the middle of it" feeling, so I wouldn't want to lose that, but it isn't without cost. Including target selection: Tim is the younger brother of the Hanzsens: "Not him, the other guy!"
And who's dumb idea was it interrupt combat to show a column lifting when one of the combatants steps on a pressure plate? This may be a throwback to the original PoP, where the pressure plates were more subtle than today. But it's a poor choice.
Let's keep in mind, however, in the face of these criticisms, that I've stayed up until 5am the last two mornings, playing this thing. I think Andrew Plotkin nailed it - the dexterity controls are "approximate and forgiving", and you become the acrobat. Running along walls like Bo Jackson is *cool*.
January 2, 2004 11:10 AM
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