Aw, and they were sooo close...

I loved the original Prince Of Persia, I never played the second one, was late playing the third one (thank God!), and loved The Sands Of Time... I felt really disappointed and frustrated by Warrior Within, not because of the focus on combat, the darker tone, or the nu-metal soundtrack, but because of a very few game design decisions that marred the entire experience for me. The boss battles were more like a bad 3D fighting game than the fantastic, fluid, acrobatic experience that The Sands Of Time had brought to the table, and there was no way to backtrack to discover certain secret areas that not only unlocked a powerful new weapon, but THE PROPER ENDING TO THE GAME as well! This isn't like a special bonus cinematic or an unlocked game mode, but rather how the story actually goes! Imagine me, maybe halfway through the game, realizing that I'm fucked because I missed one of several secret areas earlier and now must restart the entire game with a strategy guide by my side throughout if I want to see how it's supposed to end! Frustration doesn't even begin to describe what I was feeling as I plodded through the rest of what was an otherwise entertaining game.

Anyway, I finally picked-up The Two Thrones and was delighted to see that the designers had remedied many of the problems introduced by Warrior Within. Speed Kills essentially make combat optional, boss battles incorporate the surrounding environments and thus require more than just combat, and secret areas seem to yield only health bonuses, making them optional but still rewarding. I thought everything was actually pretty wonderful until last night, when I got to the end of the 4th chapter. I found myself faced with a terribly unintuitive puzzle that can be solved with trial and error, which lead directly to an extended chariot driving scene with no checkpoints, followed by an unskippable cutscene (why these exist in any game is beyond my understanding) that leads directly into a boss battle... Of course, I saw none of this coming, and was terribly low on resources by the time I got to the save point just before this boss battle, and now must revert to an earlier save (before the unintuitive puzzle; thank goodness I was making multiple saves) in order to conserve enough resources to have a fighting chance at this boss battle. They were so close! What a solid game otherwise! I really hope that sequence isn't indicative of the fifth and final chapter...

Otherwise, I've been trudging through TimeShift, playing through TrackMania United (uses a runtime version of Star-Force; no performance-inhibiting drivers installed!), and getting into a new season in NHL08 on the "difficult" difficulty level... As my record on the right side of this page shows, my suspicions of rubber-band gameplay need be further honed (the first three games of the season were mighty suspicious), but things do seem much more realistic at this level than at others.