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.

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.

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.

Infelizmente, o jogo traz elementos que envelhecerem bem mal, como sua câmera bugada, prendendo em paredes, mudando bruscamente sua posição, e atrapalhando (e muito!) nos combates, e nos combates em si, já que as lutas do jogo até são bonitas de ver, mas muito sem graça de jogar, diante da baixa variedade de inimigos, e repetição dos exatos mesmos métodos para derrotá-los.

Ainda assim, apesar dos pontos negativos até graves, The Sands of Time é um jogo que vale muito a pena, porque ele é excepcional naquilo que ele é bom. Deu até saudade da época que a Ubisoft era capaz de criar jogos realmente divertidos e despretensiosos.

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.