I realize that I am roughly the last person on the planet to not yet have played the new Prince of Persia games.  There is a reason for this:

Back in the heady days of my youth, I quite enjoyed Karateka.  I spent many happy hours playing it on the Apple II computers at school, and I believe it may be the first game I ever managed to “finish”

The designer of Karateka, Jordan Mechner, went on to design the original Prince of Persia game, which may have the distinction of being the first game that ever hurt me so brutally that I gave up on it for all time.  I tried to play it, I really did, but I inevitably died before even getting to the sword, and that’s about 4 rooms into the game.

With that kind of history, is it any wonder that I might be a bit skeptical about a modern 3D update?

On the other hand, it’s one of those games people rave about, so I bought it last year while Gamestop was having a 2-for-1 Xbox sale and it’s been sitting on my “play this” shelf ever since.  I have also bought the sequels.  This is a bad tendency of mine.

So anyway: I finished Brute Force a couple of days ago – and I will say that, as dull as the main character is and as repetitive the environments are, the two asteroid levels made up for the trouble playing to them and “Flint” is nicely easy on the eyes – and I needed something new.

My typical method of selecting a game is to look down the list of games on my backlog and Google for reviews, paying special attention to phrases like “too short” or “only 8 hours of gameplay” or “too easy”

Prince of Persia came with lots of reviews complaining that it was too short.  Some reviewers added “and too easy”.

Sounded like my kind of game.

In what I will consider a personal homage to the original game, I died many, many, many times before I even got to the Dagger of Time that the whole damn plot revolves around.  I came quite close to abandoning the game completely before I’d even passed the training level.

But I did eventually get the dagger and I have been happily platforming around and killing zombies for a couple of hours now.

The game has a pretty smart checkpoint / save system.  It works something like this:  Every time you manage to get through a particularly hairy sequence of the “I can’t believe I survived those whirling blades” variety,  you hit a checkpoint.  Every once in a while the game throws a bit of platforming at you that is going to require new techniques and make you die over and over again, but just to be nice you get a save point first.

Save points in Prince of Persia can be assumed to come with a blinking red sign: Frustration ahead.

This makes them a great way to know when to take a break.

I do, however, have a minor quibble with a design decision as far as the checkpoints go.

I will describe.

Last night I met the first boss fight.  It’s the scene where you meet your father again and catch up with Farah.  If you’ve never played the game, it consists of fighting 16 zombies and then a boss.  The boss is actually kind of pathetic, but the zombies can wear you down through sheer numbers, if nothing else.

When I got to this boss fight, I had just had some whirling-blade-related mishaps.  I was running on a tiny sliver of health and one full tank of sand.  That won’t make any sense if you haven’t played the game, but as I’m the last person on the planet to play it, I feel confident that I don’t need to explain about the sand.  “Tiny sliver of health” makes sense to anyone, and I am confident that we can all visualize what kinds of mishaps one can experience when whirling blades are involved.

Anyway: I looked at the mass of zombies in front of me. I looked at my health bar. I said to myself:

“I hope there was a checkpoint just before this fight.”

And there was, and it was a good thing, too, because the zombie horde killed me without breaking a sweat.

Not that zombies sweat, I guess.  Anyway, they only had to land three hits on me to kill me.

So I get the “you died! retry?” screen, as expected, and it puts me right back into the boss fight, which I didn’t entirely expect but I’m glad not to have had to go back through the platforming bits, and…

…I still have a sliver of health and one tank of sand.

I had to kill all 16 zombies, and the boss, while taking fewer than 3 hits.  This took, I do not want to think how many tries, but it turned my “I’ll just play a little bit more and then I can get to bed by 12:30” into “I hope I don’t wake the wife up coming to bed at 2.”

But, damnit, I feel good about winning that fight.  I got really, really, REALLY good at blocking, I will tell you that.  🙂