50 Games in 50* Days

The concept of this series of blog posts is 3 fold:

1. Play 50 games that I’ve never played before over (roughly) 50 days.

2. Write reviews of the games.

3. Select games on the basis that they’re cheap and offer an alternative to the cost of going out.

I thought this would be pretty cool as I’ve built up kind of a backlog of games and I wanted to play them as well as build up my review base.

*In all honesty, work is going to get in the way of hitting 50 games in 50 days but hey, it’s something to aim for!

8 – Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands

For the Xbox 360 version, this can be bought for around £3 from Amazon.co.uk – not too shabby.

After literally 376,230 entries into the Prince of Persia franchise we were rewarded with this 2010 effort in which the Prince has to use his time wibbling dagger to drag time around and kill loads of beasties from beyond the veil that man was not meant to trespass behind. Like the velvet rope at a museum though, the temptation proves too much for the Prince’s brother who is the first one to tug at the loose thread of time and unleash a demon that will surely lay waste to all of this sandy hell-hole if not stopped. The prince’s bro becomes imbued with the power of slowly corrupting evil and only the PoP and his water based girlfriend/genie/time guardian can hope to put things right.

Confused?

You will are.

The story present in this game is hardly the selling point however. We’re here for the acrobatics – and boy, does TFS live up to its’ rich heritage in those stakes. The prince flips, gambols, wall-runs, leaps and slides across ridiculous heights like Spiderman crossed with an olympic gymnast with a death wish. It’s as exciting to watch and play as it ever was, the movement fluid and the vertigo-inducing locations as treacherous as before.

What is markedly different compared to previous games is the number of enemies the prince has to fight. There are is a metric fuck-ton of skeletons around every corner in this game and they are all queueing up to be sent back to the darkness by the prince’s blade. Monsters are laughably easy to dispatch and are only a problem through sheer weight of numbers. This lends a different (and in my opinion, welcome) feel to the game as the prince feels like a badass cutting a swathe through the dusty denizens of hell. It’s cool because he now is as good with his feet on the ground as he is hundreds of feet in the air. Couple this with his cool new magic powers that make him even more deadly and controlling the prince is a whole lot of fun. And that’s why we’re here right?

The prince narrates the tale as in previous games too, his voice being similar to the friendly version from the Sands of Time game. Gone is the angsty, whiny prince thank goodness. This one is worried about his brother, a little confused about what the hell is going on, and also knows when to shut the hell up and let the player get on with working things out for themselves a little. Good work there, Ubisoft.

So there you have it. Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands is a pretty cool little game. It’s graphics and sound design do the job but the action is where it’s at. There’s a lot of fun to be had swinging around brother Malik’s palace – and you could do a lot worse for a couple of measly quid if you have a weekend stretching out ahead of you like a vast, blank canvas, begging to be filled in. I mean, you could think about picking up that guitar again, or maybe taking yourself down the gym – but we all know you’re not going to do that.

Don’t we?