Prince of Persia: 0 for 3
I recently re-acquired an Xbox and have been catching up on some games I missed out on. Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones being one of them. I wasn’t far into my quest to save Babylon when I realized I had never finished the first two games in the Sands of Time series.
I had no interest in the first game until the reviews started rolling out. It was receiving some of the highest ratings I had seen and game critics were blown away by the acrobatic and combat systems. I grabbed it for PC and put maybe a handful of hours into it before giving up. The PC version had extremely poor gamepad support and it was near impossible to play with a keyboard and mouse. Button-mashers often are. I probably should have played it on a console, but that’s beside the point. Don’t release a game for a system that you’re not going to support. Same goes for hardware – no, I haven’t let that go, yet. 😛
A year later I found myself with a copy of Warrior Within for GameCube. This time, the experience was much more enjoyable. I was hooked on the game – running on walls, flipping around bars, swinging off pillars and hacking dude’s heads off. Awesome! It was until I back-tracked myself into a corner which happened to be way the eff up, with no way down that the good vibes were diminished. I had only been using a single save slot, so I had no way of reverting to a previous point. I literally had to start the game over if I wanted to continue playing. Since I was already about 75% in and had spent every evening that week getting to where I was, I decided to trade it in at EB instead. It was still really new and I think I got $30 for it. Score!
I’m sure you see where this is going – I just gave up on The Two Thrones. I’m about 80% in, at the end of The King’s Road where you come up against ‘Axe’ and ‘Sword’ after a wicked hard chariot sequence. After a dozen or so attempts, I finally made it through the chariot sequence – which I was enjoying until this one. Albeit, without any sandtanks. I come up against these two dudes with enormous weapons. No big deal – two guys in a ring of fire. I can handle this. 10 minutes into the right and I haven’t landed a hit yet. WTF? I check some walkthroughs online and sure enough…
For lack of a better word (or words), Sword and Axe are what we’ll use to refer to the pair of bosses here, since…that’s what they’re going to use to kick your butt. And kick your butt they will. It’s going to be kicked so hard that it’ll grow a second, smaller butt, which will in turn be kicked itself. That’s how bad these guys are.
I would say that’s a bit of an understatement, too. These dudes are ridiculously hard! I’ve been playing the game every other night for the past week or so. I’ve got the controls down, the combat locked, but I feel like a useless n00b against these two. Are you kidding me? Aren’t games supposed to be fun? How is this fun? Look at how long the explanation is to beat two brutes with melee weapons! I simply can’t bring myself to be put this sort of punishment. And that’s how it feels – like punishment. Like I’ve done something wrong and now Axe and Sword are here to kick my ass to the moon and back. Well fuck you guys! Take your enormous weapons and stick them up your ass! I’ve got other games to play and that’s exactly what I’m gonna do. You watch…
Shit, I was really liking the game until that point. The chariot sequence leading up to Axe and Sword sucked, but the rest of the game was rad. Playing as the dark Prince with the swingy metal thing was great. Man, why’d they have to go and ruin it? At least it’s the last in the series. Next!