After many hours with no save points, Sphinx contemplates suicide…

Lo and behold, I’ve actually been gaming every day this week! I thought I’d give some first impressions of my second opinions to the first opinions made by Dan and AJ; specifically for the games “Prince of Persia:Warrior Within” and “Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy”

I started off playing Sphinx. The graphics are great, but the music sounds cheap and there is no recorded dialog other than some grunts and yells. This takes me right out of the game when I have to read the cutscenes. I’d rather have recorded dialog than some of the graphical bells and whistles, but I assume it was too expensive especially when you have to translate it into a bazillion languages.

I spent the first half hour needlessly throwing a rock at a palm tree from a cliff to try and knock down a coconut. This wasn’t very fun. After I finally solved that “starter puzzle” the game got better, but the save points are WAY too few and far between. They made me late to breakfast with Jeff and even then I had to leave the Xbox turned on while I was gone and pick it up when I got back. Later in the game I had saved at a save point with only one life left and low health and now whenever I die I get a game over and have to load this game with only one life left and little health so I can die some more. They only offer one save slot per profile, so I’m fucked as far as I can tell. Screw this game, I’m going home…

I decided to purge my bad Sphinx experience by starting up Warrior Within. I was instantly turned off a bit by the over the top “this is a dark and evil game” dramatics. The heavy metal music, the blood flowing over every menu screen, and that fucking awful song by Godsmack. When I started the game it got worse. The prince used to have a personality. Sometimes he was brave and dashing, sometimes he was a dick, but he was always charismatic. The new prince is just full on angry 24-7. He reminds me of Hayden Christensen trying to act as Darth Vader. “Hayden, we need you to scrunch your eyebrows and scowl some more or the audience won’t realize you’re pissed off”. Then there’s the first cutscene which features the dominatrix goth lady whom you fight several times in the beginning. She is introduced by having the camera follow her thonged ass cheeks up a flight of stairs to the deck of a ship. Nice and subtle, fellas. Subtlety is the inoperative word here. This game has none. When you fight, the prince grunts and moans like he’s passing kidney stones.

You’d be grumpy too if your underwear was that far up your ass.

Still, it is a fun game so far and worth playing. Like Sphinx, it suffers from some poorly placed save points, especially in the beginning. You’ll find yourself supremely frustrated at times and wondering if you should call it quits, but after you dispense with goth lady and start on the main quest, things get much better and the save points actually propel you through the game like they should. It’ll be 1:30AM and you’ll be ass tired, but still you’ll want to get to just one more save point…

The fighting is greatly improved over Sands of Time, but now it takes up too much of the focus of the game. PoP is about the acrobatics and obstacles, not about hack and slashing and this game forgets that. Granted, there are plenty of great puzzle sequences, but so far the bulk of the game is spent fighting.

Warrior Within also lacks the polish of Sands. The camera angles are terrible at times to the point of switching right as you’re running to jump off a cliff. It’s often extremely hard to figure out where you’re trying to go partially because of the bad camera, but also because everything is so dark. The save points often have the bad habit of pointing you in the wrong direction when you load the game. This can be bad considering how much back tracking you do during the game. On a few occasions, I found myself running the obstacles back to the start of the level without realizing it.

So far Warrior Within is not a must play like Sands of Time, but if you liked SoT and want more, it’s worth your while.

Tune in next week to read more about the differences between Warrior and Sands, get my final verdict of the game (if I beat it by then), and find out whether or not I denounce the credibility of either AJ or Dan or both.