Jan 12 2011, 02:04 PM
I would now like to recount my attempt to playthrough the entire Prince of Persia Sands of Time Trilogy (Before trying out the latest in the series, Forgotten Sands), all of which I acquired during the last Steam sales.
So, first I get Sands of Time. My rose tinted glasses of recall + 2 tell me that the game had good story, voice acting, platforming (Which wasn't great, just interesting and fun) but had boring combat and lame boss fights. When I first fired it up, the first thing that hit me was the random slowdowns that kick in every now and then (Especially during the cutscenes). So, off I go to the Steam forums to find a solution... Turns out, the game doesn't understand what dual core CPUs are, so you have to disable one core. No biggie. Random slowdowns occur less often but still come in during the in-game cutscenes. But that's not the biggest issue.
The biggest issue was still the controller support. I got this series fully expecting to play it with my Xbox 360 controller and this game didn't support it quite well (Menus couldn't be controlled with it for one). Plus, there was this annoying bug that would happen whenever I change the Prince's running direction, where he would suddenly start walking in a direction instead of continuing his run (Something to do with the diagonal axis detection working not quite right).
Anyway, the game proper seemed inline with my rose tinted glasses' prediction (Except the cutscenes which aged badly). Finished it in 2 sittings and so proceeded to Warrior Within after that.
I liked Warrior Within despite the bad rock music and gothic undertones. The platforming was harder and more challenging (But less awe inspiring like SoT) and the combat was pretty sweet.
But, unlike SoT, the first hitch happened before I even fired up the game. The game, refused to start. The configuration utility that starts actually has the "Launch Game" button greyed out despite checking ever checkbox in the requirements. Looked up the Steam pages and found no such issue with anyone else. Desperate, I looked up the requirements of the game in the game's store page, and I made a horrible discovery...
Supported OS: Windows® 2000/XP (only)
I'm running Vista.
Crap, there goes my quest to finish the trilogy before the new game. Will I need to do a quest to do a dualboot with XP or just give up? Undeterred, I tried various tricks to try to get it to work (Starting the game from the folder, messing around with some compatibility options) and then I found it! Administrator rights enabled and go!
Oh yes, I forgot to mention that silly fog fix that I need to hack into the config because of the engine's quirkiness on nVidia cards.
Fired up the game proper and lo and behold, slowdown is still there... But at least the controller walk bug is gone. So, after putting one core to sleep, I was off on the Prince's quest to save himself from the Dahaka, except that the slowdown WAS STILL THERE. Disabling the extra core just LESSENED the slowdown, it was still prevalent in just about every cutscene, and in random locations around the game (I'm guessing about 40% of the time). To add insult to injury, the slowdowns differed in scale. When there was a lot of ambient light, quite slow, when there was water, a little slow, a lot of fog, super slow. There was also those weird slowdowns that kicked in whenever the camera moved, resulting in combat and platforming being quite frustrating to do.
In spite of all that crap, I pushed on... Rose tinted glasses started cracking a little (So, now its +1 instead of 2). The platforming wasn't that challenging, but was mostly uninspiring and the constant backtracking annoyed me quite a bit. The Dahaka chase scenes which I thought were pretty good, turned out to be pretty crap instead. The voice acting was bad and the story was even worse than I remember. The combat just felt frustrating instead of hard as I struggled in those multi-enemy encounters way too much (To think that I actually finished this game in Hard before) and the boss fights were quite stressful on my old self. Funny thing was, the music wasn't that bad or maybe I've just gotten better at zoning out horrible emo metal.
The worst part about this revisit was realizing that the camera is really crap compared to SoT. It often lingers too long, way too lazy and amazingly enough, it sometimes doesn't show where you're supposed to go correctly (Which was one of the best things about SoT, whereby the camera guided you're platforming path), which results in a lot of needless deaths and rewinds.
After perhaps 14 stonking hours battling both the enemies and the game itself, I was finally done with it... Well, not quite. In my haste, I only picked up a handful of the Life Upgrades, so I only got one ending and was too half-arsed to get the rest... So, I downloaded a save file and tried to do battle with the Dahaka... After a few attempts, I was at this point quite aggravated by the game and just quit entirely and moved on to the next game, hoping at least that my rose tinted glasses were wrong for the next game as well.
I never quite liked The Two Thrones. I felt like it was the uncomfortable middle child of SoT and WW where it had quite inspiring platforming and passable combat, but nowhere near as good as either for each. So, as I fired up the game, I figured "Ok, this one probably works in Vista since it might be using a new engine". It didn't. Upon starting the game, the same configuration utility starts up and the same issue is repeated. Check Steam store page, and same requirements. So, I decide to check the SoT page to see if that one had the same requirements.
It did.
So, in effect, I'm playing all three games on an unsupported OS, so all my experiences are technically tainted... But whatever.
Admin rights enabled, one core to sleep and go! Ok, slowdown bug is almost non-existent this time (Except in some ingame cutscenes) but all is not clear, because the stupid diagonal axis walk bug is back! AAAARRRRGGGHHHHHHH!!!! Oddly enough, it didn't interfere with my experience as much since it almost never happened. Probably because there were less static cameras being used now (Which was often when that would kick in).
Played through the game until I reach the last boss. Story's really bad, but at least they got the original voice back for the Prince (WW's one was godawful) and he reminded me of the SoT Prince (Which is good). I also now smash my proverbial rose tinted glasses as my impressions of the game beforehand were completely off.
The platforming was quite atrocious (Just boring really) and the combat wasn't as bad as I remembered (But still boring mostly and the stealth kills were lame). The boss fights were quite meh and the chariot races were sterile. But the biggest crime of all... Was the voice acting of everyone else and the script.
Farah and the Vizier... Aside from the fact that these two characters now had American accents, they had moronic dialogue as well whereby they use modern slang phrases that kill the atmosphere completely. The really sad part is, that the Prince speaks EXACTLY like he does in SoT (The whole regal and dignified talking style which was perfect) and these two other jokers seem to be doing everything in their power to kill it instead.
I mentioned earlier, I had just hit the last boss... Up until this point, all of the bugs on modern systems, didn't do anything to hinder my progress or spoil my experience... Except when I hit the last boss. During the second phase of the battle where he floats around (Waiting to be QTEd), and the floor has these rotating rocks that you have to avoid (Meaning you need to be quite fast on your feet), the stupid controller walk button kicks in. It doesn't just "kick in", it lands its foot square up your asshole and goes so far in that you can taste the rubber sole. The walk happens EVERY TIME you try to turn while running simply because its using a single camera in the middle of the arena. It made it almost IMPOSSIBLE to win using a gamepad as I would constantly walk face first into rocks or just fail to mount the boss.
I finally had to resort to using the keyboard to get around this issue. And once I did, the ending that I got didn't seem like a proper reward.
So, after about a week, I was done with the trilogy and was now read y to start the next in the series... Forgotten Sands. Now, after realizing how much I liked the Prince's voice actor, I decided to wiki the game to find out... And I find out something else instead: Forgotten Sands takes place between SoT and WW... Meaning that I didn't need to play through the two prequels beforehand. Also, Forgotten Sands is like 6.5 gigs, which is slightly smaller than the first three games combined. I passed. Maybe later.
And that's my retro adventure with the Sands of Time Trilogy.
tl;dr:
Don't play it if you have any PC built after 2006.
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