But now what do I find? Ubisoft are debooting (unbooting? rerebooting? retrobooting?) their franchise to coincide with the new Jerry Bruckheimer Prince of Persia movie. The new game will be set between The Sands of Time and Warrior Within, and presumably explain the ancient mystery of how the prince became so unlikeable.

What about the cliffhanger ending to the ’08 Prince? What about Elika? What about the big god trying to kill the world? It seems our only hope for answers to these questions is some kind of unretrobooting. And that seems about as likely as Ang Lee making a Hulk sequel.

So, do I hate this crazy new Prince, with his illustrated body, big scarf, and strong american accent? Well, no, because Ubisoft seem to have the knack back. After two sessions I’ve been won over; mostly due to the care they’ve taken with the dialogue between the Prince and his new friend, Elika. Someone over there has clearly found wherever they wrote down the secret of charming, simple, entertaining and amusing storytelling before they lost it for Warrior Within.

The platforming is simpler in many ways, but unlike some I don’t think that necessarily translates to easy, or at least, not to bad easy. Yes, some of the obstacles are removed by having you simply jump at a wall to wall-run, rather than holding a thumbstick towards the wall. But those obstacles were the obstacles of irritation and not the obstacles of working out where the hell to go next. Meanwhile, the game takes the surprising move of having collectables which actually have a story function — meaning that when I do eventually scour the kingdom for all 1001 of them, I’ll have the dubious excuse that not all of them have been collected in the name of obsessive compulsion.

Finally, and I’m not sure it’s even necessary to point this out, it’s a beautiful game. After the gorgeous visuals of Assassin’s Creed I’d have been disappointed if it wasn’t, but it’s its own crazy kind of illustrated, fairytale beautiful, with the beautifully animated Elika the icing on the cake.¹ If you leave the game alone for a bit, it’ll even pan across some of its soothing landscapes, just to make sure you realise that it’s very, very nice indeed.

It’s kind of easy, but it’s kind of nice. Certainly, after playing Left 4 Dead and constantly being brutally slaughtered by legions of hideous zombies, this hits the spot.

1. Clearly someone’s learned the value of subtlety at some point since Warrior Within.

Sequels are tricky things. Warrior Within‘s predecessor, The Sands of Time, was near-perfect. But it didn’t sell too well, presumably because the Prince wasn’t driving a car or shooting anyone, or even playing professional sport. So, as well as trying to improve upon perfection, Ubisoft also had to try and make the game more marketable without losing what made the first game so special. In order to do this, they tried to make the game more ‘adult’ and less ‘fairy-tale’. Clever readers will probably see that this isn’t likely to mesh well with keeping what made the first game so special. But even if you were deliberately moving away from The Sands of Time‘s mythic quality, you could still find a cool new place to go.

Or, you could add boobs, butts, rock music and random swearing. Sure. Whatever.

It’s not as bad as it sounds, really.¹ Yes, the Prince bears almost no resemblance to the charming but foolish hero of the previous game. Yes, he’s started swearing at the villains.² Yes, the music is about as Indian as a Quarter Pounder. But, the gameplay has only gotten more slick, the combat awesome, and the game has lost that slightly niggling feeling of linearity without gaining the even more annoying feeling of excessive backtracking.

So — what’s the Prince’s problem anyhow? He sorted things out neatly at the end of the last game, didn’t he? Well, yes and no. Yes it was sorted out, no, it wasn’t neat. There’s a few paradoxes hanging around the place, and it turns out there’s a huge monster who likes to eat people who cause paradoxes. And so, the Prince travels to the Island of Time™ — the place that the Sands of Time™ came from in the first place — to see if he can’t find a way to put things right. Once there he finds a series of time-travelling portals that transport him to the ancient past, and back again. This, it must be said, is an awesome idea, and it’s handled well. In fact, it all even manages to make sense for a considerably large chunk of the game.

In the previous game, you had a few moves. In Warrior Within, you have scores. Not only are there a boodle of new combos that look awesome and aren’t too much of a hassle to pull off, but you can also pick yourself up extra weapons along the way. There’s one particularly cool move where you can flip over a near-death opponent, spin around, grab his weapon, and then twist your body about, slicing the poor sucker’s head off. In slow motion, with an awesome camera angle. Or, you could kill him normally and pick the weapon up afterwards — but it’s not nearly as much fun. You can even throw the things — a very nice way to deal with the sneaky little bastards who’ll attempt to ambush you in the middle of highly complicated acrobatic manoeuvres.³

All the special time manipulating powers are back this time too — you can roll time back, blast sandy goodness from your person, slow down time… the usual. Well, not quite; when you slow down time, you don’t slow down yourself, thus making it considerably more useful than the Sands of Time incarnation of the power. How are you doing this without that handy dagger? Well, you’ve got Farah’s Amulet of Time™ which you picked up after the last game.⁴ No, she’s not in it (sniff) but at least her legacy is felt. So where’s the romance, you ask? Well, there’s this priestess called Kaileena, you see. You can tell she’s the love interest because she’s wearing three strips of red cloth and has breasts like bowling balls. What’s that? That’s not enough to build a romance on? Tell that to the Prince; despite her showing him little attention, or even seeming particularly nice, he’s continually wondering if maybe they could have something.⁵ The game’s peurile, high-school level attempts at being sexy don’t end there, but I shan’t go into more detail because, frankly, you wouldn’t believe it anyway.

Did I mention that when you’re near pillars with enemies about, you can swing around them and slice the baddies up real good? Because you can. Awesome.

The unhurried style of The Sands of Time is broken up in this game by the thrilling Dahaka segments. The Dahaka is basically some kind of time creature that wanders the world removing paradoxical elements from the timeline.⁶ This is a problem for the Prince, who is — let’s face it — the biggest problem the timeline has had in some time.⁷ And so, when the Dahaka turns up, the world turns all sepia and blurry, and you’ve got to run for your life. These segments are handled really well — there’s enough clarity so that you almost always can see the path you should take, but at the same time the music and camera angles are pretty scary. They’re also a clever way for the game to force you to go a certain direction. Even cuter is when the destruction wrought by the Dahaka in the past affects you in the future.

Oh, and there’s this move where you jump on your hand and spin a few kicks about before slashing back into combat again. Awesome.

The hidden health upgrades are back as well — and because of the more exploratory nature of the game, you can go around searching for them at almost any point in the game. And you really should, because you get a much cooler ending if you find all of them.⁸ I’m not sure about this sort of crap though. Giving a completely different ending seems less like rewarding the expert gamer and more like penalising the novice gamer to me. But I would say that, falling more into the latter category.

This game is a mixture of fantastic and lame. In terms of the actual gameplay, it’s probably superior to The Sands of Time — though the extra options do sacrifice some of the impressive elegance of it’s predecessor’s controls. But in terms of style, it’s lost out considerably. I don’t really mind the rock music — though a mixture of old fashioned Indian and modern rock would have been truly cool. But you just don’t feel for the Prince, or anyone, as much as you did in the first game. Tonally, Warrior Within is more action movie than legend, and it loses a lot as a result. But it’s still tremendously playable and great fun. It’s times like this I’m really glad that we don’t do star ratings on this site.

1. Of course, you might not even think that it does sound bad.
2. Yes, he’s voiced by that pansy Byron from Babylon 5‘s excreable fifth season.
3. Those pricks. They’re just jealous of my incredible athletic prowess.
4. Collect the whole set!
5. I’d like to think that, in a life-threatening situation, a semi-naked woman with humongous boobies wouldn’t be enough to distract me from my purpose. I really would like to think that.
6. A distant relative of the Reapers one assumes.
7. Time presumably is a meaningless concept for the timeline and thus this sentence makes no sense.
8. Just make sure that you’re not playing the Xbox version if you missed the one behind the throne near the start, because there’s a bug in the game and you can’t get back if you go for it. BASTARDS! Not that I’m bitter. Luckily Jackson was playing it at the same time and was able to show me the ‘proper’ ending.

Platformers used to be my favouritest sort of game in the whole world. Commander Keen, Mario, Sonic. But then the world changed. Two dimensions just weren’t good enough any more and everyone was trying to recreate the same fun in the big three. This had a few main effects; boredom, one dimensionality masquerading as three, and swearing at horrid camera angles that don’t make clear exactly where the damn platform is. Things looked bleak.¹

Then, Prince of Persia, one of the greatest of the primitive platformers, is reborn as a three-dimensional platformer.² This was a while back, but it takes me a while to get round to playing most games. Over the last month I’ve played both it and its resulting sequels, Warrior Within and The Two Thrones — I’ll be reviewing all of these, and so there’ll be a bit of comparison back and forth. But The Sands of Time is a good place to start, because not only is it the first, but it’s the best. Well, overall. Allow me to justify myself over the rest of the review.

I’m a sucker for a neat, elegant, heroic plot, and a touch of romance. This game has that. You’re a Prince (of Persia, even) who’s father has been tricked into stealing a great big whopping hourglass (and a bunch of other stuff) from some other Sultan by a sneaky looking Vizier. As with every Vizier in every story ever told, this gentlemen is treacherous and evil³ and has a cunning plan to get his own hands on the sands within the hourglass. However, the hourglass gets broken, and the resulting special effect turns everyone in the Maharaja’s palace into scary monsters. The only people left untouched seem to be yourself and the previous owner of the Sands’ daughter, Farah.

The plot of the game mostly consists in fighting your way through the now treacherous, trap-filled, monster-ridden palace. This might sound a bit boring on paper but in games (and unlike film) having one solid quest that you’re continuously plodding towards is actually pretty satisfying. Especially if the company’s good. And it is — you quickly enter a slightly suspicious alliance with the lovely Farah and journey together. As one might expect, a budding romance results, with delightful dialogue and some cute plot twists. Of course the deal-breaker with such things is the voice acting — fortunately both Yuri Lowenthal and Joanna Wasick are fantastic, delivering the funny lines brilliantly and the cheesier ones believably.

Look at this. I’m on my fifth paragraph and I haven’t even mentioned the gameplay. You can see what an unreliable game reviewer I am. But in fact, the gameplay is perhaps the most important aspect of the game, in that it’s absolutely seamless. Elegant and predictable, every action is pretty much what you’d expect. The only fiddle is that the jump button doubles as the roll button which causes some problems when you’re trying to jump over an enemy’s head and instead roll into their feet.⁴ But other than that, things are fantastic. Jumping, swinging, climbing, running along walls — after playing Sands of Time for a while you feel like an athlete, but your fingers don’t have to jump through hoops to do it. You will however need all these skills to operate some of the amusing puzzles you find on the way. The mirrors in the library are particularly cute.

You do have to fight the evil sand monsters, though. Invulnerable to normal weapons, luckily these bastards can be stabbed by the Dagger of Time™ when they’re down — and then they stay down. This makes the combat quite interesting, balancing the need to not get hit with the need to get over to that guy on the floor and stab him good. Of course, when you do, often another one will respawn. Most of the combat in The Sands of Time is like running a gauntlet; you find a room with monsters, and then you kill, and kill, and kill, until they finally stop for no apparent reason.⁵ This wears you down a bit but it only gets truly irritating when you’re also stuck fighting your evil-magic-perverted father at the same time, quite early in the game.⁶ You also have to make sure that bow-wielding Farah is safe from harm, but she’s quite capable for a secondary character.

What with death-defying leaps across yawning chasms, insane acrobatics, and violent meanies with big swords and worse tempers, things can get nasty. Luckily, your Dagger of Time™ comes with a very handy power — the ability to rewind time. This cute little idea makes a good game great and allows the game a lot more freedom to make crazier levels, safe in the knowledge that you’ve probably got enough rewindable time up your sleeve to try a few different leaps of faith. Later on you find yourself some other powers — slowing time, blasting a wave of magical sand goodness out around yourself, etc. You also get the ability to rewind time more and more. Other Prince self-help includes the mystical journeys you occasionally make down hidden passages that result in your total health being upgraded.

Have I missed anything? If you don’t want to play this game right now then it’s possible I have. Elegant story. Cute romance.⁷ Spectacular views. Interesting puzzles. Tremendous acrobatics. Highly enjoyable, if a little simple, fight system. Underwhelming final boss. Oh alright, that last bit isn’t so good. But the rest is awesome. The Sands of Time is a near-perfect, lovingly crafted game.

1. I don’t actually know much about gaming history. This is just my impression having been near a few N64s, Dreamcasts and Playstations over the years.
2. Apparently there was a previous three dimensional experiment but no one wants to talk about it.
3. Are Viziers so important that everyone feels compelled to keep hiring them?
4. This button duality is common to all three games in the series and thus I cannot guarantee that this particular upset actually occurred to me in this specific chapter. These are the dangers of reviewing games after playing three similar ones in a row.
5. Well, I think someone mentioned something about that area being exhausted of its magic or somesuch.
6. Oddly, the most difficult part of the game as well.
7. As Farah actually follows you around, you can stare at her if you should choose. But she’ll notice you and warn you to stop. At least, at first.

We got the yellow pages the other day. L-Z is now sleek and black with yellow highlights, an inverted A-K. I reckon A-K must be getting jealous. L-Z looks awesome. Speaking of awesome redesigns, the DS got a whole lot more sexy yesterday (or rather, it will) after the announcement of the DS Lite. A hot Australia Day was made even more annoying when I had to wipe the drool off Andy’s keyboard as he gibbered in the corner.

Finally, X3 seems to be getting a subtitle: ‘The Last Stand’. I don’t like subtitles. I don’t know where to put them on reviews. When X2 came out I saw ‘X-Men United’ bandied around the place but it’s not on the actual film. IMDb calls it a “promotional title”. After the film’s release they’re lost in the mists of time. Besides, what’s the point of doing subtitles when “The Secret of the Ooze” has already been taken? Nothing’s going to top that. X3 is apparently “the conclusion of this trilogy” according to some 20th Century Fox executive. I like how studio bosses are getting artistically involved in movies these days.