Gaming Frustrations Part 1: Prince of Persia

I’ve held back from going off on one about computer games for quite some time now, because quite frankly there are a million and two other sites and blogs out there that will always do it better.  However, it’s probably unavoidable as I have been maintaining a lifelong love affair with games and still do to this day along with many other refusing-to-grow-up individuals such as myself who continues to baffle parents as to why we haven’t grown out of this yet.

I have a strange condition whereby over the last couple of years, I have become increasingly susceptible to marketing, advertising and the hype machine of modern society that wants you to spend money on the Next Big Thing.  I blame this on working a boring nine-to-five week and then being sucker punched by gimmicky adverts that promise a little glimmer of excitement, but that’s beside the point.  The point is, that as a result of this condition (lets call it buying-new-things-syndrome:  BNTS) I have made a few purchases that have then somewhat languished as I either haven’t had time to use them or they just haven’t held my attention for the same amount of time that I expected them to.  This is in particular relevant to various games that I may or may not have bought over the past couple of years and then left to sit on the shelf in a state of semi-completion.

Yesterday evening and this evening, to relieve a little bit of angst-ridden stress, I decided that I’d cross what I could off my “to finish” list.  Behind the cut, I shall be talking about the rebooted Prince of Persia, so if by any chance you don’t want to know the score, look away now.  There may be spoilers, although at this point, considering that the game has been out for over a year, if you even know what I’m talking about, chances are these spoilers are akin to finding out that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father*.

Prince of Persia is a curious beast.  I’m not sure what to make of it, but that’s ok, because I don’t think the beast itself knows either.  It’s either ok, or awful, and I’m not sure which side it falls down on.  It almost feels like a button-pressing-rhythm game akin to Guitar Hero where instead of a guitar you use a controller and instead of brightly coloured lights moving down the screen telling you what to do it’s different shaped scenery Of Obvious Purpose Requiring A Specific Button, but then I suppose if you abstract it all out, maybe that’s all games ever are:  visual cues telling you which button to press.  However, once you get down to that level you’re getting towards the comment that of course everything a computer does is only ever a series of 1s and 0s and then you’re down to life really just being about yes or no answers and existence itself being either there or not-there but at that point my head hurts and I need to take a minute to recover my train of thought.

It might be this odd little tangent concerning binary cropping up if I think too hard about the Prince of Persia that made me keep playing it, because that little tangent also wipes my memory of what I was complaining about (or at least about to complain about) and I end up being able to continue with my button-pressing-adventure unhindered, with only a faint nagging sensation that something isn’t quite right, that would then blossom into the full blown yes-no realisation thus bringing me back to where I started.  (This then of course repeats until I need sleep or get bored.)

This little loop is not really what I wanted to talk about.  The problem that I had was with the ending.  All the way through the game you have been attempting to clean up a demolished kingdom of a certain flavour of evil that has left black inky slime everywhere and striving towards imprisoning a dark god of unspeakable evil inside a magical tree.  In order to do this, you have to jump around four different-yet-similar themed areas defeating four different-yet-similar big boss monster things and healing the land through the use of the flavour of magic that is of opposite nature to the flavour of evil that is being all dark and gloopy.

The game is your traditional modern affair in terms of length.  Beautiful graphics that sort of jump out at you when for just a split second your eyes flicker away from the single small part of the screen that you were focussing on, but as a result length of game is reduced.  Despite this, cleaning up all of the evil is a bit of a slog.  Not an entirely unpleasant slog, just a bit like doing the dishes:  You have to work yourself up to doing it, but once you’re doing it it’s ok and it’s quite nice to see that you’re getting somewhere.  However, the main thing is that despite the short play time and moderate enjoyment obtained from playing, it still feels like a slog to get this magical tree rebuilt to imprison the dark evil god for good.

Then comes that moment that all gamers can recognise where things start to wrap up.  All four mini-large-monster-bosses are dead, all the lands are healed, blue skies are back again, and an unmistakable final boss encounter starts to happen.  All is good.  I even quite like the final boss encounter.  The game even does something to make me go “Oh no!” by killing off my companion who I’d actually grown relatively attached to (SPOILER WARNoh damn I missed it.).  Then I’m dumped out of the boss in front of the reformed magical tree with the lifeless corpse of my friend lying beside me.  I scoop her up and leave the tree-temple and as I’m walking out, the end credits start to roll up the screen.I guess I should never ever get involved in special effects.

At this point, I think “hey, that’s not a bad ending.”

It does however utterly fail at one crucial requirement for all endings to have:  It doesn’t actually end there.

The player is then dumped back into the freshly healed world and given the visual clues that he can bring his friend back to life by destroying the tree: the tree that I’d just spent the entire game trying to fix.

Maybe this is some kind of experiment.  Maybe there is actually an alternative ending where you can just say “screw this” and walk off into the desert.  Maybe this is a test to see if the player goes through with it and doesn’t just say “screw this” and walk off into the kitchen.  Maybe it speaks volumes about my own personality that I did neither and just went along with what the pretty flashing lights on the television told me to do (see my earlier comment about being susceptible to marketing and advertising).

So I broke the tree.  I broke the magical tree.  I broke the magical tree that was imprisoning the evil dark god of dark evil.  I broke the magical tree that was imprisoning the evil dark god of dark evil that I had spent the last x number of sessions and in fact the entire game trying to fix.
On the plus side, I get my companion back, but she’s a bit miffed about the whole thing and I’m right with her, because as we’re casually striding out of the recently-saved-but-now-ultimately-doomed-kingdom and into the desert the evil dark god of dark evil does indeed break lose from the prison that I just broke and rises up menacingly behind us, filling the air with darkness, and one would assume, evil.

That is where the game ends.

And weirdly enough, I’m back to thinking about loops.  Did this game mean to do this?  Was this a comment on the futility of existence?  That no matter what you do, there’s not much point because it’ll break again anyway?  Should I in fact not clean my flat anymore because it’ll just get dirty again anyway?  Is Ubisoft trying to tell me to go outside and get a life because playing games is pointless?  Are they trying to say that defeating this evil wasn’t the important thing, developing the companionship with your friend was important and defeating the evil was just the thing that you did together to build rapport?  Either way, they took away my hard work by making me undo it.  Or maybe I didn’t have to, but I feel angry because they tricked me into doing it.  Or maybe I didn’t have to but I feel angry at myself for not realising that in time.

Maybe the very cyclical nature of the game whereby you start and end at square one is a greater comment on eastern philosophy which oft takes on a very cyclical nature, and seeing as the game has the word “Persia” in the title, then we’re clearly meant to be in an eastern location.  Maybe not.  After thinking about this for a certain amount of time, I decided that no, this probably wasn’t a calculated attempt at sending a message, this was possible a suited publisher getting to that original ending that I quite liked and saying “wait a minute guys, you’re not leaving any room for a sequel….” and then you can extrapolate a possible conversation from there.**  The achievement the game awards you at the end of the games is even called “To Be Continued….” so they obviously have devious plans.

Maybe I’m way off there.  Maybe this has been well documented and I’m just being too lazy to do any research (yes the internet is really useful as a research tool, but the shortcut to Firefox is all the over there and I’d have to move the mouse…) but the whole thing confuses me and I’m not too sure why, or even if, I actually enjoyed most of it.

Additional Notes:

*Actually, I’m being a little bit thoughtless.  I suppose “Darth Vader = Luke’s Father” is still technically a spoiler…Oh, what are the odds that hurt anyone.

**Yes, I’m still young and naive enough to assume that someone wearing a suit probably doesn’t know what they’re doing.  When I go to work, I wear dark jeans and a suit jacket, which probably indicates that I don’t know what I’m doing HALF of the time.