Sulphur on 1/8/2010 at 19:22
Quick recap: I caved in and bought Ubi's unholy DRM-imbued
personal computing flavour of The Sands that Were Forgot. Because I got it for cheapo's, and I wasn't about to spend $50 if I could $12 instead. So there we have it: I voted with my wallet. In, erm, not the exact way that term means. But still!
So I installed it, and it works like a charm. The DRM, that is - disconnect the 'net, and no playtime for you! Surprisingly enough, I haven't had much of a problem with it. The game logs in, launches, plays smooth as butter. I'm not advocating this bullshit, but there's a game behind it that I want to play. And playing it I am.
I'm 3/4ths of the way in, I think. And the story is intriguing in how forgettably plotted it is. I mean, the vague outline is there, brushed out in broad strokes, but the details escape me. Something about King Solomon, sands being unleashed, and your brother being a dick. Sounds like an episode from when I was a teenager, minus the King Solomon part. (Have
you had sands unleashed in your underwear while you were minding your own business digging holes in the beach for people like your brother to fall into? Not pleasant, I can tell you that.)
But screw that. Let's talk about the Forgotten Sands.
The best part about it? The platforming. The brilliant, brilliant platforming. Prince of Persia's always been a game about the flow - presented with an obstacle to traverse from point A, you chain your basic moves into a sort of death-defying, acrobatic ballet across yawning abysses and glittering spikes and suspended columns until you land at point B.
The good news is that The Forgotten Sands does exactly that, and does it
better. There's some honest to goodness refinement in the controls from SoT era PoP: the Prince's controls are buttery smooth now, and there's far less launching into the abyss at random thanks to it. There's also a bunch of powers like freezing water that play off the core rules, and that's when they get really clever, putting in these bits where you have to mix the different powers around, making you think quick on your feet.
So when you're running along a wall to a frozen gout and swinging off into the distance towards a solid waterfall and unfreezing it just before you splash through and land onto a piece of crumbling masonry you've just rebuilt, that's when the
flow comes to you, and you remember, you feel it - you're the
motherfucking Prince of motherfucking PERSIA, bitches!
It's been far too long. Am I the only one who gets a little tingle every time the camera pans out across a room and details the path you need to follow to get through it? Because, damn, it's one of the few pure gaming thrills I can still feel in recent years.
Graphics-wise, it's sorta mixed. Not the best-looking PoP ever, but it doesn't need to be. The new prince looks like some weird-ass combination of the old SoT Trilogy Princes and, uh, (
http://www.churchofthecustomer.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/11/20/prince.jpg) Prince. But as a sort of retooled Sands of Time for the modern generation, it brings the detailed Persian decor back, and and
and - lovingly crafted Persian architecture <3. I love me some Persian architecture, and this here is a visual goddamn
feast when it comes to that.
However, they missed out on the lighting almost completely. There might be SSAO, but the gauzy, Arabian Nights-esque haze and silk curtains and story-time atmosphere is, for the most part, missing. No pearlescent moonbeams or shafts of golden sunlight lancing through most of these hallways, no sirree. :(
There's also some random stupidity, to the gameplay. For one, the platforming feels easier, and that's probably because it
is easier. As is the combat. It's a little lax with time limits and encounter difficulty compared to oldskool SoT. There's also a questionable power or two (
Area effect combat spells and a spell that makes you invulnerable? A power that launches you towards enemies? Makeshift vulture platforming a la God of War 3's harpies? What the?). And the story, I'm sorry, lacks any heft or depth or carriage whatsoever. Yuri's back on the narrating, but the story has been cookie-cutter and slightly cheesy so far. I do not expect it to get better. It will not match up to SoT's narrative; this I can wager an entire donkey laden with riches on, if only it weren't named Farah and not in some farway not-Persian land and not gotten lost.
But at the end of the day, the almighty
flow is above all and still paramount. It's probably even more so now than it ever was before. That's great, because apart from the narrative, what really defined SoT for me was the sense of 'oh, just
one more go' and before you knew it, it was 3 A.M. Sorta like how I started writing this epic mini-essay an hour ago when it was only supposed to be a five-minute two-paragraph thing.
Ah, well. It's a good game. That's what it comes down to. It's a very
familiar game, and while the character narrative may be somewhat soulless, the
architectural narrative of the game as you swing from pillar to post to magically frozen streams of water in that forever graceful dance towards the endgame, is a different story altogether.
It feels great to be back home.
