So the latest OXM has the Prince of Persia demo. WOOT!
I must say I like it a lot – it lives up to much of the hype. EXCEPT:
When you start a level, you are treated to a two-minute (or at least it feels that long) animation which helpfully shows the basic level structure. However, when you die (which happens when you run out of the rewind juice, or when you aren’t quick enough on the rewind trigger), you are shown that animation AGAIN. And there is no way to skip it or fast-forward through it.
And of course you still wind up dying a lot in this game (especially if you haven’t played platformers in as long as I haven’t!). So a lot of time is wasted seeing this animation.
If anyone has any connections at Ubi Soft, PLEASE see that they add some way to skip these animations!!! Otherwise it sucks a lot of the fun out when every retry is broken up by a 120 second mandatory pause.
Phew. Now that I’ve said that, I’m going to go back to wall-running and timed jumping and triggers and man, it really does make me nostalgic for the original…
I played the demo recently myself and was really annoyed by the non-skippable death re-animations as well. It’s just one of the little checklist issues that need attention for the final based on this early test.
I know the demo is based on a rather unoptimized early beta of some form, but the bugs really threw me off guard. The whole ‘rewind’ feature had me confused for awhile because it really isn’t in a working stable condition in this demo. Too often I’d slap the L1 button the moment I mistimed a jump(mostly in that long downward spiral section with the wall switches and retractable platforms) and it always felt like there was a major delay before it clicked on and worked. A few times it froze the demo solid, and once I nailed it perfectly and watched myself slowly reverse back up onto the platform I slipped off, but just as I was letting go to revert time in safety the demo screen turned white and reset me back to the title screen. Must have reset time to the moment before I even started the demo…
Game shows promise however. The actually platforming and area design shown is quite creative and spectacular even. (No warehouses and/or crates in the demo at least.) And despite reeking of glitches and early code, I was quite impressed myself.
Damn! Tricked into reading this thread by what appeared to be a piratical rating system, where 3 Argghhs! and an Avast There Jim-lad! would be a game of surpassing excellence.
