Nitpicky Reviewer: Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones

In every Nitpicky Reviewer post, I will discuss the things in movies and games that no one else cares about. The little choices filmmakers and game developers make, or forget to make, makes me crazy.

Before I start, I liked the game. It was fun and I was excited to pick it up every morning at work. How do I make a Nitpicky Reviewer post about a game I liked? I'll just have to focus on everything that sucked and channel the energy into sarcastic rage until I hate the game. Here we go.

Immediately upon starting the game, in the tutorial, I am hit with the garlicy punch of confusion.

I ran towards a boarded doorway with only crawling space available to pass under it. In bold white text I am told to press the space bar to roll under. Sweet, it works. Next, I am told to press the space bar to jump up on top of a crate (yes, even Persia is home to a few). That also works. Then I am told to move the right analog stick to look around. What the fuck? Right analog stick? This isn't a Playstation. It was a port, though.

I spent the next twenty minutes setting up a computer 'gamepad.' It's really not a 'pad' but a 'regular controller' modeled exactly like a Playstation controller - except it uses the numbers 1-9 instead of, Square, Triangle, L, R, etc. Even though the game was ported from consoles with inherently similar button schemes, no default button setup existed for my perfectly replicated gamepad. So I looked up the control sceme used on a real controller and mapped it to mine.

Do you know how hard it was to move downwards through the menus? As you can imagine, there were plenty of buttons I had to assign: buttons 1-9 and three analog sticks. At the top and bottom of the list of buttons sat a small arrow. Neither clicking and holding one of these arrows nor holding the down arrow on my keyboard moved me any farther down the list. I could click the arrow once to move it down a single row, but it only detected about one click per second. As many people know, rapid clicking ensues when a list is ready to be moved. I was clicking away and it was hardly moving. It's very frustrating to not recieve feedback when clicking.

I finished mapping the buttons and I am good to go. I love the way this game keeps you constantly occupied. You rarely walk more than 5 seconds without approaching a new puzzle. These aren't the puzzles that frustrate the player. They rub your back and make you feel good like a prostitute does - the way all games should be according to Shigesato Itoi. I've been wanting to quote that for a while.

As I was saying, the player is constantly rewarded. Though this is my first Prince of Persia game, I am pretty certain this is signature to the series. Quick puzzles, quick fights, and if you save your 'sands of time,' you can quickly correct a misstep.

This is genius game design. People hate repeating levels again and again. So, introduce these sands of time that allow a player to rewind time up to about 6 or 7 seconds, and they can retry that part of the puzzle. Only the people that play Contra, the ones that enjoy punching glass shards with their face, like repeatedly starting stages from the very beginning. I'll say it a hundred times proud as the casual gamer I am: Fuck That Shit. Thank you, Prince of Persia. You have saved me hundreds of dollars in healthcare.

The sands of time were especially important to the story of the game. Those powerful, essential grains of time saved me from tearing my ears off every time I heard the story. Each piece of dialogue was stuffed fuller of cliches than clothes in a college student's laundry basket. Be it the angry protagonist bitching about the world, his verbal inhabiting demon bitching about him being such a bitch, or his bitching bitch side-kick that he loves except she doesn't know who he is because he turned time backwards. Sucks to be you.

During boss fights, the parts I did have to repeat a number of times, I had to watch 30 second, unskippable cut scenes. Wait. Some of those cutscenes were skippable. Please, developers, be consistant. Make them all skippable.

Luckily, the game solves its own problem of bad storytelling. If you screw up a jump, usually resulting in a fall to your death, while the story is being told and you then rewind time... the words are cut off! You don't have to hear any of it.

"Notice how the well has no water, Prince? Do you know why it has no water? I'll tell you. It's because (oops, a little early. rewind)"

Wait. Because what? Why? Why is there no water? Ahhh Nooooooo! I want to know! I'm sorry I made fun of you. I promise. I'll get over the kitschy dialogue, I love the game. It's a ton of fun. Please, forgive me, just tell me why there's no water. I want to know, I really do. AHHH!

You would think that the dialogue would rewind as well. No, no you wouldn't, who are we kidding. That's a level of polish reserved for only the classiest games.

And before you ask, no, I'm not going to let myself die so I can listen to it again. That would take too much time.

Another huge problem occurs because, like most games, the storytelling happens between scenes. You finish a few puzzles, get to the other side of the burning village, and Voila! story time. But, you know what also happens between sections of gameplay? Saving. The player can only save at water fountains - err... fountains of water - so every time I see one I immediately run over to it and save the game. Every single time the stroy telling is cut off. Saving cuts off the storytelling. Sigh.

When I access the in-game menu - which allows me to adjust the graphics, audio, controls and, of course, to save - the female narrator says one of a few things including:
"Would you like to continue the story here?" or "This is an excellent place to resume your story."

Alright, we got it. It's a story. Are you postmodern or are you reassuring me that everything will be OK because... I forgot to mention, this narrator dies about an hour into the game. She both appears in and narrates the first bit of the story, she speaks every time the menu is accessed, and then she is murdered. And then she starts narrating again. That was a nice twist and a perfect opportunity to completely shock the player by permanently removing this female and her voice from the story. Instead, we are at first confused that she narrates the menu to us right after dying and secondly given the expectation that she will show up again later.

Since she's still narrating, she must be important, right? Yet by the time I'm battling the final boss, which is one of the coolest fights ever, she still hasn't shown up. Not until the very end of the game, after the what-I-just-thought-was-the-final boss, after the last level that was so awesome and out of this world that I will say it rivals the final levels of Half-Life 1, she shows up for a few seconds in the final cutscene as a laughing, smiling, I-knew-you-could-do-it, sexy sand phantasm. Except sand isn't that sexy. Even if it's curvy.

According to one of the final cutscenes, the villagers rose up against their demonic slavers. They were outnumbered, out-equipped - pitchforks and broken doors as shields versus daggers, swords, rapiers and supernatural muscle, and, also, out of this fucking world. These skinny, sun-beaten, farm hands that had been enslaved for days somehow had enough strength to defeat an army of unholy sand minions. Whatever. They don't call it 'suspending your disbelief' for giggles.

By the way, I love green-ery. The last few levels of Prince of Persia made it worth the 10 bucks an hours I was paid to play it. The overused glow filter on castle shrubbery, crumbled castles, streams of water, and the prince's glistening golden leftarm brought peace to my mind. It reminds me that I need to pick Farcry back up, because I love the jungle scenery.

Another element that I liked, that I think all games with cities or other large conquerable spaces should possess, are high points where you can view it all. Usually these special places are found before and after a large map so that you can see your destiny and then see how you've left your mark.

In the beginning, I think to myself, 'This place looks awesome, though I think it'll be hell beating to death every devil spawn that I see. But, you know, I'll enjoy every damn minute of it.' At the end of the stage, after scaling a half-destroyed tower, I gaze at the burning city through a hole made by a cannon and think, 'I just aced this part of the game. I just completed every bit of this city. Damn, it looks so big from up here!'

It's pure gaming joy.

Things I won't get into detail about: The voice acting. Why won't I go in to detail? Because every game I've played after Bioshock seems to have shitty voice acting - even if it isn't that bad. That game made a new bar.

I love the doors in the game. Every single time I saw a door I tried to walk though it and slammed right into it. The prince doesn't use doors! They're all locked anyway. Call me a slow learner, sure, but I kept thinking I could one would open for me, like every other game. That's not how Le Prince de parkour gets around town, though. In every other world, gaming or irl, doors afford transition from one place to the next, yet here, they just hit you in the face.

What can I say? I liked the game. I wanted to play it - unlike the upcoming Dancing with the Stars - which I didn't know was a video game already - that I will be playing this week. Well, who knows, that game may rock.

Also, this game rarely left me confused. At some points I may have felt the game was too easy, but, for me at least, there's a fine line between too easy and really annoying. I'll take the former.

This is a game I would recommend to my dad who recently retired from more hardcore games like Unreal Tournament. He's now living off of puzzle games like Inca Ball and Blockbuster. Even though Prince of Persia involves combat, the majority of gameplay consists of ultra-satisfying puzzles.

Most of the combat is even set up like a puzzle. The player tries to figure out how to position him or herself behind an enemy in order to initiate a 'quick kill'. Instead of entering regular combat, the angle changes and the prince starts his attack. The player must press the attack button when the prince's dagger flashes bright white. Some enemies require only one correct hit and some up to five. If the player does so successfully, the prince slays the enemy without a fight. Also, the player is rewarded with the killing stroke performed in slow motion that probably looked amazing when the game first came out.

Play it, ignore the storyline, don't worry, be happy.