Ubisoft's first Prince of Persia outing is a rough diamond that needed a bit more sanding to be perfect. The fluid parkour and platforming still surprisingly hold up well today. Every single platforming and puzzle section is designed in a way to keep you and your brain constantly moving at a steady but careful pace, all while you soak in the immaculate atmosphere of the tower you climb from bottom to top. Most of the time the game is firing on all cylinders to try to deliver a near-perfect experience, but Sands of Time isn't all perfect though, as the combat has definitely shown its age... and the story... oh man the story.

In PoP: TSOT, you follow The Prince (obviously) as he ascends the Tower of Dawn to put a stop to a curse unleashed by himself via ancient hourglass. Along the way you meet Farah... and that is as much as I can tell you. To be frank, I checked out of the story because the dialogue mixing was so bad for most of the game I could not hear a single word said, and whatever I did hear... oh boy. To put it simply: it sucks. To divulge more: it might be the worst dialogue I've ever heard in a video game full stop. It isn't even so bad it's good, the game is so verbose and yappy while managing to say nothing at the same time. Hell I think this is the first game I've ever played where there are actual grammatical errors in the dialogue, and I don't mean slang, no it is genuinely awful. The characters lack charm and it was an utter waste of voice talent. I don't know how a script can make Yuri Lowenthal sound unbearable, but here we are 21 years later.

Pre Ninja Gaiden/ DMC 3 character action games definitely have a hard time when it comes to lock on mechanics. I don't mind auto-lock, in fact i think manual lock would probably be detrimental to this game's combat loop, but the auto-lock in this game just isn't good. More times than not The Prince would just kind of have a mind of his own, and try to sandstun an enemy I wasn't pointing the stick at, or make me flip over an enemy I was almost no where near. I feel this is exacerbated by the lack of restraint practiced by the enemy placement, as enemies can horde you very quickly and stun-lock you. These enemies were made with precision in mind, so it is sometimes frustrating that the game just controls like a sedated donkey.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time scrapes the surface of being perfect, but can't quite stick the landing very well. It didn't exactly make me fall in love with the IP, but it did make me fall in love with Third-Person Platformers again. Highly recommend.

The Sands of Time é um jogo de qualidade inquestionável. Seu protagonista é carismático, sua aventura é boba, divertida e charmosa, suas mecânicas de plataforma, com estilo parkour, envelheceram excepcionalmente bem, e seus gráficos e direção artística são algo digno de nota.

O sistema rewind, por mais que não seja tão impressionante hoje em dia, era muito bom, e aplicado de uma forma realmente inovadora para época; sem contar que é um sistema que ajuda muito no jogo, especialmente durante alguns combates malsucedidos, onde voltar o tempo é muito melhor que reiniciar os encontros.

Falando em combates, aqui começam os problemas. Por mais que as lutas sejam visualmente bonitas e estilosas, com o Prince dando piruetas e desviando com graça e estilo, são lutas realmente bem básicas e repetitivas, e que são dificultadas apenas pela imprecisão do controle (já que não é incomum você querer atacar o inimigo A, e jogo te jogar para cima do inimigo B) e da câmera, que aliados ao fato de que o ataque vem em hordas, vão gerar uns momentos bem frustrantes.

E já que eu falei na câmera, ela é tenebrosa! Ela prende em paredes, se embanana quando você está lutando com vários inimigos, muda bruscamente sua posição nos momentos mais inconvenientes, e atrapalha (e muito!) a vida do jogador em determinados momentos.

E olha, esses elementos falhos do jogo são frustrantes, mesmo considerando que The Sands é um jogo relativamente fácil. Não espere nada complexo ou de outro mundo aqui, você vai morrer por uma desatenção, testando o cenário, o por alguma injustiça mecânica da jornada, e nada mais!

Enfim, The Sands of Time tem pontos negativos relativamente graves, mas acaba se mostrando um jogo excepcional naquilo que ele é bom, que é ter esse clima de aventura de sessão da tarde, com personagens carismáticos, ambientação impecável, e um excepcional gameplay de plataforma. Sem contar que o rewind, que é o poder de voltar no tempo, acaba contornando as falhas de gameplay, uma vez que poupam o jogador de reiniciar o combate. E essas características boas acabam salvando o jogo, e fazem dele algo realmente muito bom, ainda que seja uma experiência que demanda concessões e paciência. Deu até saudade da época que a Ubisoft era capaz de criar jogos realmente divertidos e despretensiosos.

Is anyone actually on this site?

I've been playing a lot of video games lately instead of reading or watching movies and am feeling a little guilty. Books and movies pertain to my work as a writer a bit more. If I'm spending my time not writing reading books or watching movies then at least I'm consuming things that might influence my writing, things I might learn from. And it's not like video games are totally unrelated to what I do. It's art. All art is input, and all input is valuable.

But I mean. My engagement with video games can be pretty mindless, especially relative to other mediums. I like when the man jump. I like when the gun shoot.

Writing about games, then, is a way of alleviating the guilt. If I can articulate what I like or dislike about a game in prose then it feels like less of a waste of time!

***

A few weeks ago I found a CRT by the dumpster near my house. I've always wanted a CRT, so I lugged the sucker home and, once finding that it worked, looked on Craigslist for any cheap listings for retro video game consoles, and my goodness look! A PS2 complete with components, two controllers, a memory card, and three games, for a mere $80! God works in mysterious ways, yet we follow Her lead.

I met the guy in the parking lot of a technical school on the outskirts of town. He gave me The Goods in a Trader Joe's bag. He was an awkward, nerdy looking late millenial guy. I was also awkward, of course. I mean to cast no shade. We kept it terse, and I was on my way.

The three games that came with the console: Max Payne, Tom Clancy's Splinter cell, and (drum roll) Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Max Payne is what most excited me. I have it on Steam and tried getting into it a few times, never clicked. Maybe this would get me to finally finish it.

Alas! The PS2 port of Max Payne is...not good! We're talking frame drops in gun fights rendering the scene Power Point esque. We're talking shitty twin stick shooter controls (KB+M forever, motherfuckers!!!). When people look back to the PS2 with reverence they seem to forget that it was the weakest console of that generation, and that its ports tended to be the worst.

I'll come back to Max Payne. Someday.

Next I tried Prince of Persia.

Still a pretty solid game with good puzzles and parkour. The combat can be frustrating, mainly because of the camera which is the worst enemy in this game... (the ps2 era cameras are just another level of nightmare man)
Also Farah can be really annoying sometimes,she can die so you need to protect her in almost every battle in the game. if you thought Ashley in RE4 was bad... oh boy...
The OST is amazing, and the graphics are classic ps2 standard i can easily say that is not the best looking game in ps2...
The story is good but nothing exceptional, is kinda cool i guess...
Good Game.

Warrior Within was one of the first video games I experienced, and every time I tried the first game, I would get bored and start Warrior Within again and finish it. Sands Of Time took a back seat for me, as the combat system and atmosphere in the 2nd game appealed to me then and still does. At the age of 26, I finished this game and I realize how much I miss fairy tale stories and why this game is a pearl. Despite the rough edges like the sloppy PC port, the slightly unbalanced platforming elements, the same type of enemies, only one final boss, it is truly a legend. Kakolookiyam...


Warrior Within ilk deneyim ettiğim video oyunlarından biri ve ilk oyunu her denememde sıkılıp tekrar Warrior Within'e başlayıp onu bitirirdim. 2. oyundaki dövüş sistemi ve atmosfer o zaman ve hâlâ bana hitap ettiği için Sands Of Time arkada kaldı benim için. 26 yaşında bu oyunu bitirmiş bulunuyorum ve masalsı hikâyeleri ne kadar özlediğimi hatta bu oyunun neden bir inci tanesi olduğunu daha iyi anlıyorum. Özensiz PC portu, oyundaki ufak tefek dengesiz platform ögeleri, sürekli aynı tip düşman var olması, sadece son bir boss olması gibi pürüzlere rağmen gerçekten bir efsane. Kakolookiyam...

Before playing this, I had very little exposure to Prince of Persia. I knew it was a series of action platformers. I knew there was a bad movie adaptation of it. I remember really wanting to play Warrior Within since the cover for the Gamecube version looked super cool and edgy, but my parents wouldn't let elementary school me buy it, so I ended up playing games like Chibi-Robo and Animal Crossing instead. I played maybe 20 minutes of the Wii version of Forgotten Sands a while back. That's about it. I only ended up playing this game now because I wanted to play at least one of the older Prince of Persia titles before diving into Lost Crown. Although I do think Sands of Time has some pretty big flaws, I do want to preface this by saying I had an absolutely great time playing it. This might be the recency bias talking, but this could easily be up there with something like the original Dragon's Dogma on my list of "best 7/10 games you'll ever play". A good two thirds of the game is made up of what would now be mockingly referred to as "uncharted climbing", there's a certain deliberateness to all of your actions that still makes it enjoyable. Most of the game's challenges boil down to having to figure out how to traverse a room or outdoor area, then actually timing things like pole swings and wall jumps to make it happen. Simply having to do things like press a button to raise yourself up or drop down a ledge, or not being able to stand up on a pole you can swing on and instead having to turn around, swing, then jump against the wall in order to get to a pole directly above you are satisfying enough to keep platforming interesting. Using the dagger to rewind time mostly seemed like a gimmick to me thanks to the fast load times and incredibly generous checkpointing of the PC release, but then I got to the point near the end of the game where you have to climb a large tower without it and I realized just how nice it was to be able to undo one bad jump or something without having to go through the whole sequence again.

The combat is rather simple, though not because of the Prince's moveset. You have a basic melee combo, a block and parry, several abilities tied to the Dagger of Time, and a few acrobatic moves such as a lunge that's performed by jumping against a wall or vaulting over an enemy to attack them from behind. I do quite like how most enemies don't actually die unless you stab them with the dagger while they're down ( a pretty clear inspiration for the systems used by games like Assasin's Creed or the Arkham series where you have to confirm takedowns) and the enemy variety is nice, but there are two things that hold the combat sections back. The first is that most enemies have one attack that's always the best way to deal with them. Use the lunge against the two-sided spearmen or the big guys with swords. Vault over the female enemies with two swords and the big hammer guys. You can vary this up, especially with the parry, but it always feels like you're just drawing out encounters in order to use cool moves that are weaker than the best option. The second issue is the encounter design itself. Fights are mostly limited to open spaces and enemies come at you in groups of three or four. Kill an enemy, and another one will spawn in to take its place. Repeat this 15 or 20 times. Now I get that that's probably due to hardware limitations, but it really makes fights feel like they're artificially dragged out when you just keep cutting down enemies and exact copies of them appear out of nowhere like there's a spectral clown car just driving around the arena. I also get that the development team didn't want the game to be like 90% platforming so they needed to put more combat encounters in the game, but doing something like putting some enemies in the mostly empty hallways of the palace, or even just putting some traps in the arenas and letting you use them on the enemies could have gone a long way.

As far as presentation goes, the game holds up pretty well. The art direction and the way that the Prince grows more disheveled as the game goes on really sell it, and Yuri Lowenthal's performance is easily a high point in his career. He manages to sell the Prince as both a cocky noble seeking glory and as someone who's in way over his head and who knows it. I particularly like the narration of the Prince retelling the story of the game to Farah and the parts where you fail and he goes "No no no, I jumped over the bridge" or things like that. The music was generally fine, but there were a few standout tracks. A lot of it is a kind of mix of metal music and stereotypically Arabian music. I really wish there were more tracks that leaned into using vocals like The Tower of Dawn or Discover the Royal Chambers, though. The story itself was decent enough, but I felt like Farah as a character was pretty bland and her romance with the Prince was forced to the point that I honestly couldn't tell if she was actually into him or just seduced him to steal the dagger near the end (it seems like she only did this because he hesitated the first time they got to the hourglass, but IDK). For like half of the game I couldn't even remember her name and just thought of her as the girl who pulled switches. I do like the overall story of the Prince letting his pride get the better of him and making a terrible mistake that he then has to try and fix, though. It's very much a tragic tale in the classical sense of the word.

The PC port was surprisingly stable considering this is just a game from 2003, but I did have two issues with it. First was that the fog effects are just fucked to the point of completely covering the screen in the stuff. Thankfully the fog can just be turned off, but I don't really know how much that impacts the atmosphere of the game since I played through the whole thing without any fog. Second was that a lot of the dialogue from Farah during gameplay was super quiet, almost to the point of being unintelligible. This seemed like some kind of positional audio thing, but I can't say for sure since there were times where I could barely hear even though she was like three feet away from the Prince. It was still pretty painless for an older title, though, since I didn't have to really mess with compatibility or fan patches or any of the other tinkering that you normally have to do to make a game like this run on modern hardware. Considering I mostly played this game on a whim and got it for like $2 in a Steam sale, I'm really glad I played it. I'm looking forward to playing the other PoP games in the future, particularly Warrior Within. I want to see if it's really as edgy as the box art suggests.

The Sands of Time is a very fluid and exhilarating platformer, with smartly designed environmental puzzles, a killer soundtrack and fun chemistry between the Prince and Farah. The game is just held back by garbage combat encounters that overwhelm you with tons of enemies and it gets very frustrating and very repetitive as the game goes on. Not enough mechanical complexity or enemy types to justify these lengthy encounters. Still, this is a solid atmospheric adventure through ancient Persia that is worth playing for the stellar platforming alone.