PWiince of Persia : Rival Swords

Like I mentioned in this post, this game took great pleasure in cockblocking me at every turn.

At the start of this game, it deceived me into thinking that it was going to be a cakewalk because the first half of the game involves nothing more than you finding the next ledge to jump off from and maybe kill a few enemies who almost always have their backs turned away from you. Also from what I remember from the original PC version, you spend the majority of the game trying to figure out how to get through the different levels by jumping, running, and avoiding getting killed.

True to form, you get to do pretty much the same stuff here. Only awesomer. If you’ve seen the Youtube video I posted in the linked entry above, you’ll see the fun part of the game. Where you get to do acrobatic stunts like knife-slash-ride down curtains, wall-run, wall-jump, and kill shit. All because the Prince does not know how to open doors.

Seriously. There are countless doors in this game, but you cannot open a single one. You can break through walls, you can discover hidden passageways to the next level/room, you can control the flow of time. But once you’re faced with a normal, everyday,garden variety wooden door, the Prince will sit there with his thumb up his ass until you figure out his next move.

Anyway, what the aforementioned Youtube vid didn’t show is how repetitive, time consuming, and ultimately frustrating it can get. You know, because having too much fun is not allowed in video games.

For example, when fighting one of the bosses (the Jawless Brute/Giant I believe he’s called), you have to figure out where to climb up so you’re at the same level as his head, trigger a speed kill, and then do it a couple more times until he’s dead. A split second miscalculation can spell the difference between life and death. Which really isn’t that bad if not for the fact that you have to sit through the excruciatingly long cut scene that introduces the boss every single time you go up against him. No amount of button mashing can get you to skip the cut scene.

And don’t get me started on the final boss. Imagine writing on the chalk board 1,000 times the sentence “I will not piss on my teacher’s coffee cup.” Then if you make a mistake; say for example putting a coma instead of a period at the end of one sentence, you don’t only get to repeat that sentence, but you have to start everything from scratch. That’s how infuriating that boss battle can be. Of course, the game offers you the option of turning back time up to a certain point so you can do it right this time. But if you’re like me, you’d have used up all your time controlling tokens so you can make the Prince look like he’s humping a pillar.

Now I know why people are driven to do things like this:

You know, to serve as an example for the other games.

But anyway, thanks to my perseverance and an unholy obsession in finishing the game not because I wanted to see the end, but because I refuse to live under the same roof with a game that can taunt and insult my masculinity every time I walk by. I get enough of that from my wife. The whole experience is not unlike the youtube video below of a young girl going through the same boss battle that had stumped me for weeks (complete with high pitched screaming and expletives.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcI9Rr4Lu-k]

But after finishing the game, I’m back to being awesomed by it. My initial gripes are still there. The things I hate about the game are still being hated. But now they’re cast in a whole different light. I’ve come to accept the fact that if the game isn’t as ball-slappingly hard and frustrating as it is, then in all likelihood, I wouldn’t be awesomed by it as much.