1961

Spiderman? Those are clearly Silent Hill 2 and 3.

Edit: Oh, I guess I meant Silent Hill 4. The room one. But yeah, that’s gotta be Spiderman 2. Which is brilliant, so good on him. The other is Silent Hill 2. Which you already knew. Hooray for me!

1962

Two Thrones is pretty solid as well. It may not have the charm and the story that SoT had, but it isn’t angsty annoying like 2 and it has much better gameplay mechanics. At least try it for a while and if you aren’t annoyed by the Dark Prince and Farah-lite, then the game itself is pretty enjoyable.

1963

The Farah model in the Sands of Time was cuter, FWIW. And I couldn’t get past some of the timed sequences in the end of the Two Thrones without an infinite health cheat. I beat the Sands of Time fair and square.

Also, The Two Thrones suffers from the STUPID problem that a particularly difficult fight occurs AFTER an unskippable cutscene that lasts at least 30 seconds, so you’re forced to watch it about 30 times at least. The person that made that decision should be tarred and feathered, and ridden out of town on a rail.

1964

Yeah, I couldn’t even get halfway through Two Thrones. I loved the gameplay in Warrior Within (surprisingly so, I almost gave up on the game when it started so horribly, but it gets much, much better), but Two Thrones has really hard and long combat sequences. The only way to avoid them is to be really good at QTE sequences, and I’m terrible at QTEs. It helps in PoP that if you get a QTE timing wrong, you can rewind time and try again. But you only have a limited number of retries, and sometimes I ran out of those, and then the local node keeps respawning enemies until you deactivate it. It’s a really painful system that wouldn’t be as painful if I was better at QTEs, but I’m not, so I thought Two Thrones was by far the worst game in the series. I never even got to see the trilogy to its conclusion because of those damned QTEs.

1965

Ratchet and Clank, Jak and Daxter

I’d say that those two were probably better than the Splinter Cell/Prince of Persia sets.

1966

It’s hard to criticize the combat model of Two Thrones when they actually provide you with an ability to instagib most of the enemies in the game at the start of the fight with your dagger.

That said, the combat in Warrior Within was more solid.

1967

Why? When the fights often felt like a punishment for failing the QTE…

I got to the boss fight with the Sword and Axe guys before shelving it. Shouldn’t have given it that long, but I was so hopeful that it would bring back the Sands of Time magic at some point. Sigh.

1968

You do realize that the “chance to instagib” that you’re talking about is the same thing that I’m talking about when I call them QTEs right? It isn’t hard to criticize that model for me, because I suck at QTEs. Especially since the ones in Two Thrones don’t require different button presses: it’s the same button every time. You’d think that would make them easier, but actually, that gave the developers an excuse to make them tighter, timing-wise. So you only have a fraction of the time to press the button that most games allow for their QTEs… er… sorry, I meant “chance to instagib with the dagger”.

Plus you usually have to do several in a row. For those that haven’t played the game, don’t worry this isn’t a spoiler, this is a basic game mechanic. Basically, this is the “stealth” way of killing enemies in Two Thrones. There’s a bunch of enemies around a spawn point, and if you can use the environment to get at them from the right angle (that part is really cool, as always), you get the chance to instagib them with your dagger. The screen changes color for a fraction of a second as you’re about to stab each enemy as part of a canned animation. If you press the button within that fraction of a second, you get to try to stab them again (unless it’s one of the really weak enemies from the beginning of the game), and then if you get several QTEs right in a row, you move on to the next enemy. If you fail to press the buttons in time, the enemy catches you and throws you to the ground, and usually runs to the spawn point and activates it, which means you’re going to be fighting enemies for the next 10 minutes. (Or more likely, dying, and reloading from the last checkpoint). The hell of it is, even if you get the first QTE right, and the second, if you miss the third and get thrown to the ground, you still fail, so you rewind time and try again. Except it’s not safe to rewind time a little bit, because what if you “resume” playing at just the moment when you needed to do the 2nd QTE? You’ll fail. So the safe thing to do is to rewind all the way and try the whole sequence again.

As always in the Prince of Persia series, you get limited rewinds, and earn more by killing certain enemies, (by collecting their “sand”), so what this means is that every time you get to one of these situations, if you run out of rewinds while trying the QTEs, and the spawn point gets activated, then you don’t have any rewinds left for the fighting either, which makes it even more likely that you’ll die and have to reload from a point before you did all the acrobatic stuff to get into position to make the stealth kill.

Bah, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to go into this for so long. Suffice it to say: if you’re bad at QTEs with really harsh timing required, avoid The Two Thrones.

1969

I thought a quick-time event was when the player is suddenly required to do something during an otherwise non-interactive cutscene.

Broadening the terminology to include any action that requires precise timing makes it so vague as to be practically useless.

1970

Well, the other thing that makes them QTEs is that they exist outside the regular game mechanics. E.g., the game suddenly demands that you press ‘X’ to execute a backstab just as some sudden timing test, not because ‘X’ is an actual backstab move in the game.

(I’m not sure if that applies to PoP, as I haven’t gotten to the newer ones yet)

1971

Rock8man:

I don’t like QTEs either. The instakills that you could do before the fight were not QTEs, at least not in the usual sense. You just had to sneak up on a platform behind a guard and then you could attack him once you were in position.

The QTE events I imagined you were referring to were the boss fights where you have a couple of seconds to press a button or two that let you do some serious damage, and you needed to actually do some of the QTEs to win boss battles - they weren’t optional. But the boss battles were only a small part of Two Thrones.

1972

I played through Two Thrones on the PSP. Great game. The ending was an awesome finally to the trillogy.

1973

Kareem: Gotcha, I didn’t know that Two Thrones had boss fights, I never got that far.

In a way, if you don’t count the stealth kill QTEs as real QTEs, then in a way they were much worse than real QTEs, because the timing was much harsher than anything you see in God of War, or other games. Plus remember, it wasn’t just one that you had to do. You had to hit it at the right time at least three times to get one stealth kill.

The reason I count them as QTEs is because it’s a canned animation, which plays out the same every time. You “activate” the animation, then you have to press the button each time when prompted on the screen (the screen changes color), and each successful button press keeps the “movie” playing on the screen, whereas an unsuccessful button-press plays a different movie (one of the enemy throwing you down to the ground). The only that makes them different from QTEs in other games is that you press the same button every time, instead of a different button, and of course, the timing is a little narrower than QTEs generally are in other games.

1974

I believe they’re “combos” in the arcade fighter definition of the term, which is an idea as old as the PoP series itself. At first it was accidental, later on, as it is here, it is intentional.

1975

I should look up a story summary or something for PoP, I could never finish the series either.

Although my reason wins, my girlfriend was banging the Prince. At least his voice actor. Fucker is was in every damn game in 2006 too.

1976

This thread has been won.

Please close it.

1977

Yuri Lowenthal?

1978

Yeah, Zen. In all fairness he didn’t know we were involved.

Meeting him later on though…awkward…

I worked it out for the most part though. I destroyed about 10 copies of Fastback, but it’s a shit movie anyway.

1979

By this reasoning, the entirety of Dance Dance Revolution is a QTE.

No, as has already been pointed out, this is just a plain old combo system. It’s a fully integrated aspect of combat, not some scripted “event”.

1980

Sorry, apologies for mixing my terminology then. I’ll rephrase. I hate it when action games show pre-scripted animation sequences/movies where they show an on-screen prompt to press a button in order to advance the movie/animation sequence, and only give you an ultra-narrow window of opportunity to actually press the button. Is that better? I didn’t mean to sideline the actual discussion with an argument over semantics, which I don’t really care about.