Consolation Prize

I had an inkling that the Prince and Elika wouldn’t end up walking hand-in-hand into a clichéd sunset as the credits rolled at the end of Prince of Persia, but the actual ending did leave me with mixed emotions.

[Spoilers Ahead]

During the game it’s revealed that Elika had previously died and has been subsequently resurrected. Her current existence, and thus the corruption that is spreading throughout the land, is a direct result of a bargain struck by her father to free Ahriman in return for his daughter’s life. In the final climatic battle with Ahriman, Elika has to choose her fate, and in an act of self sacrifice uses her own life force to restore the Tree of Life and imprison the dark god.

It’s directly after this event where the game takes an interesting course of action. After the Prince has rushed over to the princess, gathering her lifeless body up in his arms, the controls suddenly and unexpectedly return back to the player. You’re expecting an end cinematic so it comes as a bit of surprise to learn that the game isn’t quite over just yet. This is just a pseudo ending, a prelude designed to tug at the heart strings as the Prince walks out of the temple whilst some credits roll with some suitably melancholic music playing in the background.

Upon exiting the temple the true cyclic nature of the story is revealed, and we have in fact come full circle when the Prince, lying Elika upon the temple alter, decides to destroy the Tree of Life, freeing Ahriman, but importantly restoring Elika to life. The first word uttered from her lips after her resurrection is “Why”?

Read the rest of this entry »

Prince of Persia is a glorious game to behold – a visual feast for the eyes. From the outset as I witnessed the prince wandering aimlessly amidst a sandstorm, his shouts for his lost donkey “Farah” muffled by the roaring wind; to the first encounter with Elika as she tries to evade her pursuers, I was impressed by the visual splendor. There’s little doubt in my mind that as an opening sequence Prince of Persia successfully seduces the player.

And believe me I was seduced – for most of the time.

Beyond the cell shaded graphics there is a charm to the game that I find appealing. The interaction between the Prince and Elika, which starts out as a necessary companionship born out of the circumstances, develops as the adventure progresses. The early flirtatious sarcasm and teasing matures to become a more heartfelt relationship, and I actually believe that there is some genuine affection between the two - or maybe that’s all just wishful thinking in my head.

However, juxtaposed with the good there are some aspects within Prince of Persia that aren’t quite to my liking. The four magical abilities gained by Elika at the temple of the Tree of Life, which are awarded upon gathering a set amount of light seeds are really just variants of the same theme. The Step of Ormazd shoots you directly from one magical pad to the next like a cannon ball, The Hand of Ormazd shoots you from one pad to another but in a less direct route; and upon gaining the Wings of Ormazd, Elika flies the Prince all over the map, but with only limited control to move up-down-left-right to avoid objects. We really should just view these abilities for what they are; a method to control the players exploration and provide some linearity, but some more interesting and diverse abilities certainly wouldn’t have gone amiss.

Read the rest of this entry »

The skateboarding crown once held by the Tony Hawk franchise was put in dire peril in 2007 when a new kid on the block, namely Skate, made its appearance. Developed by EA Black Box Skate generated quite a lot of praise for its innovative controls and environments upon release, and now 16 months later we’re getting a sequel. To wet your appetite a demo of Skate 2 was recently released on Xbox Live Marketplace and is scheduled to arrive on Playstation Network imminently.

The career demo lets you sample the initial first moments of the game, enabling you to comprehensively design your avatar’s look and then jump into some simple challenges. The vast customisation options not only extend to tinkering with your facial features and clothes, but also your skateboard deck, truck and wheel selection - albeit only as far as your limited $300 budget will stretch. You can appreciate that in the full game you’ll certainly be able to completely style the look of your skater as more funds become available and additional items are unlocked.

Once you’re happy with your skater then it’s straight into the tutorial as you head off to Slappy’s Skatepark, learning the odd trick or two along the way. What’s initially quite impressive is the use controller to perform tricks; from simple ollies and nollies to kick flips and rotations, they’re all handled by flicking or rotating the right analogue stick. It does take a little bit of time to get used to, and undoubtedly you will fall off your board at some point, but it does feel like a more natural control method than just simply pressing a sequence of face buttons. Once at Slappy’s you’re met with the usual assortment of ramps, and rails to perfect your jumps and grinds, but there are also a few challenges to complete as your sick tricks can be photographed for Skateboard Mag.

Read the rest of this entry »

It seems to be traditional during the festive season to offer up some sort of list, whether it’s the “Best”, “Worst”, “Overhyped” or whatever adjective fits the agenda – well it’s my turn so I’m going to dish up my top 5 favourite games played this year.

There is, however, a small caveat – and that is to be considered for the list I must have at least played the game to completion this year. You will therefore notice that some high profile games like Fable 2 and Fallout 3 aren’t on the list, as even with the best will in the world there just aren’t enough hours in the day to play EVERY game that’s released in the mad rush towards Christmas. This isn’t a vapour-ware list of games I think should be worthy, but just a plain and honest list of games that I’ve enjoyed above and beyond my expectations this year.

5. Castle Crashers (Xbox 360 - Arcade)

There is something incredibly joyous about returning to the good old simplistic hack ‘n slash genre that is so representative of Castle Crashers. It’s as if the shackles have suddenly been thrown off and your inner child has suddenly been released and you’re free to play a game just for fun again - without worrying about “what it all means”. Castle Crashers wraps this shackle free gameplay up with some beautiful art design, adds a smattering of guttural humour and gives you a game that’s a joy to play time and time again.

Read what I thought of Castle Crashers here.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the years we’ve learnt many things courtesy of the film industry; chief among them is the fact that space is certainly not a safe place for humanity to explore. And we’ve also learnt that when contact, be it with a colony, vessel, or even a town has suddenly and inexplicably been lost it’s not because of something simple like a communications malfunction, or due to static interference, it’s usually because the crew/colonists/residents have all been horribly slaughtered.

Alarm bells should be ringing loudly in the ears of whichever bright spark has decided to lead an expeditionary mission to determine the cause of the silence, but instead they will wander unconcerned (mostly) into danger like the proverbial lamb to the slaughter. This blasé attitude, although not good for promoting a long and prosperous life, does however provide the perfect setup for horror films, or alternatively in our case a Sci-Fi survival horror game.

The reason I’m making such a tenuous link to the film industry is that in some respects Dead Space feels like it’s borrowing aspects from some of the great Sci-Fi flicks of the last 30 years. However, instead of just being a carbon copy of something like Aliens, Event Horizon, or even Solaris there’s enough originality here, and delivered with such panache and polish that makes it a game that is worthy of your attention.

Playing as Isaac Clarke, an engineer aboard the USG Kellion, you and your crewmates are dispatched to the USG Ishimura – a “planet cracker” class mining vessel that rips planets apart in search of valuable minerals and ores. As you may have surmised contact with the Ishimura has been lost after an initial distress signal was received, and on rendezvousing with the stricken vessel above the planet Aegis 7 a decision is made to dock with the ship and provide any help required. It is however, only a matter of time before things go completely pear shaped leaving you to repair various systems on the Ishimura so that you can escape the nightmare.

Read the rest of this entry »

So the NXE (New Xbox Experience) finally got its official debut yesterday replacing the old “blades” dashboard with a visually slick update. I’m sure Microsoft’s Live servers were being hammered all day and were probably groaning under the pressure but I must say that from a personal perspective the update was painless, and surprisingly quick – clocking in at about 10 minutes to download and install. A time I thought was an impressive feat for such a major system update that was concurrently rolled out worldwide.

After the brief but flamboyant video lauding a whole new experience I got down to the nitty-gritty of creating my avatar. The process itself is simple to use but I’m slightly disappointed with the initial selection of features and clothing options available. For me, the creative flexibility on offer feels far more limiting than say its most obvious comparable counterpart the Nintendo “Mii”. But, I’m sure it’s not going to be too long before we see some premium content popping up on Xbox Live Marketplace that will allow further avatar personalisation and customisation. I do however like the overall artistic direction of the avatars finding them to be a nice balance between the extremes of the overly cute and the ultra realistic.

As always there’s going to be a slight learning curve when presented with any new system and NXE is no different. Overall though, I’ve found it to be intuitive and it’s certainly no more difficult to navigate then the old dashboard. Having the fallback of being able to use the “X” guide controller button to bring up a miniature mock “blade” dashboard in the center of the screen is a nice feature and it’s certainly better than having that monstrous left side bar menu screen appear.

Personally speaking the biggest boon for me is the ability to install games to the hard drive. I’ve been looking forward to this ability since it was first announced and after a brief tour of the new dashboard I installed Gears of War 2 to the hard-drive. The speed difference may be negligible on fully optimised games, but the noise reduction is amazing!

And finally I’m now able to delete all those damn arcade trial games with zero gamerscore that have been cluttering up my achievement list for the last three years from the system by simply highlighting the game from within the list and selecting “Delete Game History”.

So far I’m impressed with what Microsoft have delivered with the NXE. There appears to be the odd fault or two that needs to be ironed out, like the occasional error message when attempting to view some content, but it’s a step (or maybe even a jump) forward in the right direction.

I saw an interesting statistic the other day over at Gamasutra in an article by Matt Matthews regarding the estimated “attachment” rate for each console after 23 months on the market; or in layman’s terms: How many games on average are owned by a person for each console.

The article basically shows the ratios for each console, broken down by 1st and 3rd party titles, but for simplicity’s sake and for use within this post I’ve just totalled them as:

• Sony PS3 - 5.3
• Nintendo Wii - 5.5
• Microsoft Xbox 360 - 6.6

What I thought would be interesting would be to put the attachment rate into a personal context and analyse the statistics for retail games in my possession as of this moment in time. As regular readers will know I tend to have a bias towards the Xbox 360, favouring the Microsoft banshee over the PS3 and the Wii, but to be honest I was shocked at just how many games I had accumulated for the Redmond beast over the last few years. It’s amazing how quick you can forget what games you own when they just get stuffed into a cupboard once complete.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirror’s Edge has a lot of potential. It promises to take the FPS in a new direction focusing on the art of free running - Parkour - and away from shooting. In fact, FPS is probably the wrong acronym to use and it would be best described as a first person action game.

Mirror’s Edge is placed in a seemingly utopian city with clean streets and gleaming skyscrapers. All is not as it seems however, and this perfect society is in fact a mask for a totalitarian government with a penchant for over the top big-brother-like surveillance. The only way to deliver sensitive information in this day and age is to employ a runner - specialists in moving data under, over, and around the radar. This is where you come in as you play the role of Faith.

There are a couple of things that you need to get used to before you can get the most out of Mirror’s Edge. Firstly the controls are a little more complicated than one would usually associate with a first person game. This is mainly due to the fact that Faith can perform a variety of manoeuvres that allow her to traverse the environment with speed and grace or disarm dangerous opponents. But, it is also true that you’re brain will require a minor rewire to automatically associate “jumping” and “ducking” actions with the assigned left shoulder buttons on the controller. Secondly, you need to be aware of your environment and make good use of Faith’s “runner’s vision” which conveniently highlights objects that will be of assistance when traversing the cityscape a bright red.

Read the rest of this entry »