Prince of Persia (2008)

Minor gripe time, before I get into the excessively positive part:

Like Assassin's Creed before it, and as I've seen in the PC versions of many other multiplatform titles, the interface was designed with an Xbox 360 controller in mind. I mean, you can plug a 360 controller into Windows, but keyboards cost about 90% less and do the job just fine. So when a quick-time event prompts for a keypress, and the prompt consists of a small action icon (indicative of the key) and a bright face-button color, there is a clear feeling of neglect toward keyboard/mouse users. It's not a big issue, but it would be nice - and this is a general statement, not just for PoP - if key prompts indicated their associated keys more clearly.

Other than that, and some super-minor technological nags (on very rare occasions, the Prince will grab the wrong edge of a corner, or the camera won't do exactly the right thing - but since you can't die, it's hardly an issue anyway), I'm really enjoying PoP as it proceeds. Character development has continued at a surprising pace, revealing interesting backstories about not only Elika and the Ahura people, but the Prince as well.

More on the game structure: the world map is divided generally into four regions, each of which has six sub-areas (and as I mentioned before, some are interconnected Metroid-style, so the regions are separated more thematically than physically). Each of these regions has its own backstory, and an associated boss, a servant of Ahriman, each of which also has his/her own backstory. In five of each region's sub-areas, you'll fight the region's servant in a sort of sub-boss encounter before healing a fertile ground. And once they are all healed, in the sixth sub-area, you engage in the final boss fight with said servant. So I just did one of these today - the Alchemist - and the intensity of that fight, along with the more hectic battles I've seen in other areas as well, has me sufficiently impressed with the game's combat system.

Back to the sub-areas - although the first one in each region is freely accessible from the start, later ones have roadblocks in the form of magical plates used by the Ahura. These plates are inactive, and must be unlocked; that's why you're collecting Light Seeds. Think Samus's suit upgrades: certain areas are inaccessible until you can double-jump, or grapple, et cetera. There are four types of plate, each of which is a roadblock in four separate sub-areas (this is all illustrated very well in the in-game map, so you know exactly what you need to get where).

I've activated three of these plates so far:

• The red ones are like the jump pads in Sonic - land on it and press the magic button, and you leap somewhere, usually to (or near) another red pad, so that you string the jumps together in order to reach some final destination.
• The green ones change the Prince's sense of gravity, and make him for instance dash up or across a wall or ceiling. The Prince automatically runs until the end of the "track" is reached, so in the meantime you move left and right to dodge obstacles in real-time.
• The yellow ones are similar to the green ones, except instead of running along a surface, you fly, and must dodge obstacles by moving left/right/up/down as Elika carries you along a pre-set route.

The plate abilities aren't quite as thrilling as, say, wall-running through a canyon, but they do add some appreciated variety to the gameplay experience. And aside from being critical parts of progressing through each region, they're also used fairly frequently in Light Seed puzzles.

At 10 healed fertile grounds and one boss down, I'm somewhere less than halfway through the game, and I feel like it's going to work out to a meaty length of time in the end (I haven't been keeping track, but an estimate on the order of 20 hours sounds right). I'm really, really happy about this. Usually when I anticipate a game as much as I have this one, by the time I've put a few hours in I've become used to it (or horribly disappointed). But with this Prince, I'm still satisfied, and surprised, every time I sit down with it. I'm looking forward to the next time I play, and the time after that, all the way until the final moment.

One more thing: some people have complained about the Prince not being Persian enough. In the sense that he isn't Persian, they're 100% right. This Prince is a cocksure upstart full of Americanized slang - he's like a gymnastic Han Solo. But, so what? In the earlier trilogy, the Prince had a pseudo-European accent, and that along with his style of narration helped mold his personality as a curious traveler in a foreign and mystical land. In this game, the Prince's persona as a pragmatic adventurer who lives in the moment is reinforced by his speech and mannerisms. I guess, if anything is an issue here, it's that the title of the game is more a result of the series it stems from, than of its setting. Who cares. I really think this is just another case of people bitching on the Internet because they have nothing better to do all day.

Progress: 10 grounds healed, 1 boss killed