Playing A Game Prince of Persia: The Fallen King NDS

My hard drive is on life support, which ruled out HL2 and Assassin's Creed (and though my old Powerbook can play Lich King, its aging hardware mars the experience somewhat). So I turned on my Wii and checked out what's new on the Nintendo Channel: a playable demo of The Fallen King, which I had heard some interesting facts about. Namely, that it uses Phantom Hourglass-like controls, which I was curious to see at work in another title.

Basically, Fallen King is classic sidescrolling Prince of Persia, plus Phantom Hourglass touch-to-move controls. Though the concept is simple, the execution falters because PoP's gameplay is fundamentally different from Zelda's. Where Link can get away with using a stylus to move and use items from an overhead view, using it to tell the Prince to jump and climb walls from a side perspective is more of a stretch, and makes vertical segments a tiring exercise in jamming the stylus in the general vicinity of a ledge.

The game's secondary character, some sort of floating magi, is basically a device for enabling new level design elements - but he's not used very well (at least in the demo). You "switch" to the magi by pressing any face button or any direction on the D-pad, at which point, instead of doing tap-to-move, you're touching points of interest to the magi on the screen. Touch a grapple point, and the Prince and the magi will grapple to it. Touch an explosive magic item, and you can drag it to a destination. Touch an enemy or empty area, and the magi will fire a magic bolt out, which stuns an enemy briefly but does no damage (e.g., the complexity of combat plateaus at stunning an enemy so that the Prince can take a free swipe).

The puzzles in the demo, involving pressure plates and rolling boulders, were more difficult than I'd expect from a free taste: which makes me hopeful that the final product could actually have some genuinely challenging puzzle-platform gameplay in it. But I'll likely never find out for sure, as the rest of the gameplay is too tedious for me to sit through again. Moving to a traditional button-based control scheme would be a good first step, but even then The Fallen King is depressingly similar to the original PoP, albeit with brighter colors and meaningless magi objects.

Progress: Gave Up -- Finished three-minute demo