Though I still love the characters (and everything Elika brings to the game) and the dialog, the deeper I get into the game, the less impressed I am. Really, this game is a string of thousands of scripted quick time events, triggered either by HUD button icons or by training you to remember which button matches which obstacle, with different quick time events navigated between with the analog stick. The entire game could be an algorithm tree.

Fights are annoying, and don't really get "deeper" so much as enemies will get more "press (button) to dodge" attacks, and more "only (button) attacks hurt in this form" forms. After clearing 50% of the world map, and fully defeating one of the bosses, I'm kind of disappointed to see how limited the game ended up being. It strove to be super casual, which I like (a lot) as I find that lately games have been out pacing me in their 'hardcoreness'. But rather than slowly and gradually easing you into a fuller experience, it just expands within it's own initial box, like a bonsai kitten. Why does an adventure game have to still be super casual after 10 hours? Casual gamers don't play adventure games for 10 hours. Not the kind that can't handle more than one variable attributed to a character, or multiple abilities, or increased stats. Fuck, even Bomberman has all of those things, and games don't get any more casual.

I'm basically disappointed that the game introduces nothing new as it progresses. It'd be like if instead of introducing new kinds of gameplay gimmicks in each level of Sonic, it just introduced different kinds of springboards that bounced you up at varying heights. It never changes the paradigm, it only slightly expands on the original concepts introduced in the first level, all of which are limited to four variations and start out at two variations.

But again, these all feel like problems that could be fixed in sequels. I really like the Prince as a character (in terms of design, personality, and concept) and I want to see what comes next. I guess I still have to finish this game though...

Okay. I've gotten pretty far into it and I'm starting to love some things, and notice some annoying things.

Annoying things:

• The game consists of about 20 or so acrobatic set pieces, and that's basically it. Some look different (ie, a slide maybe ice in some areas, and slime another area, and a mossy trunk in another) and some always look identical (rings). Navigating the game basically consists of pressing the right button (out of two) combined with the right directional push to get past this obstacle. Granted, certain areas are clever in figuring out how to get to them, but the actual process of traversing the land is basically: See an obstacle, press the right button, continue in succession until on steady ground.
  
• The variation between areas is total bullshit. The Concubine creates illusions, obstacles (see above) that vanish when you approach them. The Warrior smashes the environment and changes it from what it appeared to be into new obstacles. The Alchemist fills the area with acid as you progress upwards. See a trend here? None of these things actually affect anything. These things aren't the variety, they're the illusion of variety. The stage is still the same 20 or so obstacles, the bosses aren't actually affecting the gameplay, just the mood.
  
• The plates, too, don't really add much variety. The only one I've unlocked is the flying one (which looks retarded compared to the rest of the game) and it's really more of a minigame than a new aspect of the gameplay. Things like gauntlet upgrades or new contextually-triggered Elika powers may have been more cliche, but they would've actually made me see old areas in a new light, as opposed to just being minigame barriers to the next generic area.
  
• Traveling through old areas (especially returning to the temple) feels kind of tedious. I wish that each Fertile Ground became a warp point. I understand the fun in visiting old areas to find the Light Seeds, and did that a few times, but as soon as I had to go through an area with no Light Seeds left in it, I was annoyed.
  
• There's one (and only one, as far as I can tell) area where I can see a path, but am unable to reach it because Elika keeps "saving me" when I try to drop down into it. If she let me perform the double jump instead of saving me, it would be reachable. I hate that this happens and was impressed to see it never happen, until I tried to get to that one spot. Bad form. What's annoying is that the area it's trying to restrict me from could have easily been placed above instead of below. But, whatever.
  
• The Warrior. Go to jail, Ubisoft. If there are only four bosses in the entire game, making one of them a sucky button mashing quick time event is super lame. It reminds me of Star Fox Adventure's "test of strength" where you had to mash X to beat the 'boss.' While stupid ancient dieties chanted "Test of, test of strength, test of, test of strength." UHG. Can I sign a petition to end all "mash X" quicktime events? They do not related to physical strength, they relate directly to setting your controller down on the coffee table and scratching it with your fingernail to win. Whatever.

Things I love:

• The characters are awesome. They'll usually say one or two 'required' expositional phrases, but you can keep pressing the talk button to delve deeper into the conversation. I do this 100% of the time, because their fully voice acted dialogs are charming and entertaining. The actors are great, the lack of a fake accent is great, and their chemistry is surprisingly great. As Portal was entirely a monologue of the bad guy, Prince of Persia is entirely a dialog between a romantic pair. What's really cool is that they're both obviously flirting with each other, which is very refreshing considering the often used cliche of one character doing all the flirting and the other finally "breaking" and falling in love out of nowhere. The fact that Elika is constantly saving Prince, and that Prince often has to save, heal, or help Elika, puts them in a non-stop life-or-death co-dependent situation, and they seem to get chummier the more they learn to trust each other. Elika is all "What are you thinking about?" and Prince is all *finger guns*; the progression and loss of inhibition of their flirting feels natural and realistic.
  
• Elika's magic, and the "Elika button." Every one of Elika's magical abilities is interesting and unique, and dedicating it to a single button is great, especially since she's not quite sure how to control the power herself. The light that leads the way is an awesome feature--I can't believe they have path finding for the entire game map. Elika's iconic catching of the Prince is also a great feature. And her role in combat--to warp in and save you at the last minute, at the cost of boss HP recovery--is great. The fact that you basically can't die allows for a more devil-may-care attitude that makes exploring the game world more fun.
  
• That everything has an explanation. Elika's use of magic to run on walls (to compensate for her lack of gauntlet and acrobatic abilities) is really nice, considering how annoying it is when Sonic's friends are always made to be exactly as fast as he is, cheapening his heroiness. The Prince's constant joking about how impractical these environments are, and Elika's reminders that all of the bridges were torn down by the enemies. The fact that most of the environments do seem to have a passive logic and function to them, beyond being gameplay obstacle courses. And just lots of little, casual explanations for things that you usually just take for granted in video games, like "Where are all the apartments?" "There are no fertile grounds in the apartments, we don't need to go there." It's all much more carefully planned out than is necessary.
  
• The bosses and stages as subplots. I really like how each boss has a back story, and each area has a little story to it, and how each area's story develops Elika's character more, as it was her former home. I also really like how each area or boss sort of brings up a philosophical question, and how Elika and Prince's banter will eventually 'devolve' into refined, quotable, philosophical sparring, ie: "Not everything can be solved with a sword." "True, but everything else can be solved with a lot of money or a little love."

I'm a little disappointed in how samey a lot of the game is, but I am totally engaged and wanting to finish it, if only to see where the characters and story goes. I actually really love this game, and I think it's flaws are kind of invisible until you start to play it for hours. I'm pretty sure the developers are aware of these flaws, and hopefully if there's a sequel it'll resolve them.

I basically only played until I got to the first tree or whatever. Watching how beautiful and fluid this game was in videos is one of the reasons I got an Xbox 360. I just haven't gotten around to playing it more, but, as my first impression I can say that this game should be the future of all games. Simplified controls, optional depth of exposition, cinematic combat, interesting-looking geographical navigation, removal of unjustifiable gameplay artifacts like life and persistent HP, dedicated buttons for concepts that are dependent on context. All of it is great and I wish more games were like this.

Another really cool thing this game does is progressive difficulty scaling. As you dive further into each area of the game world, the environment puzzles become more complex, which isn't exactly a "new" idea - but as you progress in the game overall (which you can do in a non-linear fashion), combat becomes more difficult as well. Enemies have more health, attack faster, and learn new defensive moves. Where the early combat situations are friendly enough to allow you to experiment, by the final boss fight you're expected to have a solid handle on the game's evasion, parry, and counterattack mechanics, which leads to some really cool boss fights.

Follow up on the magic plates: the Blue ones activate a non-interactive magical grappling hook, carrying you to a new area. It's effectively similar to the Red plates, but used more often in close quarters, as it takes an elliptical path rather than a straight one (not that this matters, since you don't actively control either one).

The game is not without its shortcomings. Combat arenas are walled off, and the quick-time events that occur when you repeatedly run into the edges can become pretty tiresome. The Prince's dialog and manner of speech may or may not be your cup of tea (I actually liked it). The ending is not much of a crowd pleaser, although I thought it was kind of cool. The mostly-seamless graphics are sometimes marred by Elika and/or the Prince clipping into walls. If you're not into the light seed thing, collecting what you need to get through the magic plate obstacles would probably be a pain. I found the light seed collection fun enough to be considered part of the main game, but if you don't, your hour-count will suffer for it.

So, yes, in many cases your mileage will vary; I really, really liked this game, but I can see why someone might not. The new PoP isn't perfect - but that's about the worst I can say about it.

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.

After replacing a bad hard drive and a failed attempt at flying home for the holidays, I'm finally able to play my new Prince of Persia. And it's almost worth ruining Christmas! In all seriousness, it is a great game, and I'm very glad I've got it to keep me busy this week.

The basic concept is the same as the previous PoP trilogy: use gravity-defying acrobatics and fancy swordplay to save a magical kingdom from destruction. The story in the new Prince is nothing remarkable in and of itself, but it is told very well, through in-game cutscenes, optional dialog sequences (with heaps of character development), and the environment design itself. Together with the haunting soundtrack and unique graphical look of the game, it really does feel like playing a storybook.

Taking a note from previous criticism, the new PoP has de-emphasized combat somewhat. Enemy encounters are rare, you only fight one at a time, and the battle system is very free-form and forgiving: it reminds me a lot of the final boss battles in Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. While far from difficult, the system is as fast-paced as you want it to be, and is very cool in the sense that it allows you to strike, parry, and so on at your whim. The system also rewards you for stringing together creative combos, encouraging you to consistently try new things in battle.

The non-difficulty is a persistent theme in the new Prince of Persia. If you've read anything about the game, the one thing you're most likely to know is that, thanks to magical female sidekick Elika, you cannot die. If an enemy gets the better of you in combat, she'll save your ass, the only caveat being that her magic powers become unusable for a (very) brief time. And if you leap to your doom while navigating through a level, she'll pick you up and put you back on solid ground. You may be wondering, well, what the fuck is the point of the game then? The point is of course, to get to your goal and defeat the bosses.

If you're worried about the effect this has on the challenge of the game, don't be. Think about it: what's the difference between Elika saving you, and your last save file saving you? This system removes the hassle of incremental "just to be safe" saves, and the time involved in "dying" and reloading. Simply put, it cuts the crap out of the game. If anything is lost here, it's some of the catharsis of finally getting that jump sequence you've failed to do a dozen times. But you also don't have to deal with as much frustration from those dozen misses; and the forgiving retries also encourage you to take risky maneuvers, just to see where they lead you. What's the worst that could happen?

Warrior Within and The Two Thrones did a lot to mix up the game's pacing in the form of Dark Prince segments. These segments were super-fun because they pushed you to move as quickly as possible, pumping your adrenaline as the Prince jumped from falling ledge to falling ledge. The new PoP does something fairly similar, but again leans toward the side of forgiveness. Certain elements of the level design, such as slides and wall-running handholds, require you to move and think quickly: combine this with the hazardous objects you have to avoid on your first run through a level, and you're encouraged to keep the pace swift (although more often than not, there is no harm in slowing down).

"First" time through? Allow me to explain. Once you get to the boss of an area and defeat him, you can heal the land there, which removes the hazardous elements and opens up new paths. Glowing items called Light Seeds appear throughout the area, which you need to collect to help Elika learn new magical powers. So now your goal is to survey the land, see where the Light Seeds are, and try to figure out how to reach them. Thus, the basic pattern is: acrobatic platforming, then a boss battle, then acrobatic puzzles. Very cool.

Though the land is divided into distinct regions, they are all connected, Metroid style, into one large world map. You can get to any region from any adjacent region, which is a cool explorational touch. And to ease the collection of Light Seeds and the progression to new areas, you can use the map to instantly teleport from any healed area to any other healed area.

All in all, this Prince is a really impressive game. The theme and setting are great, the gameplay is great, even the length is looking great at this point (I've put in a few hours already, and I've only healed four of the game's 24 areas on the map). The only thing keeping me from giving it a perfect score is that I have yet to encounter a really thrilling combat situation. But I also haven't done any of the game's main boss fights yet!

This game is the reason I need to change how the Glog handles video game titles/versions. And yet, I still haven't done it. Huh.