Warrior Without
Dec. 24th, 2004 10:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothI decided I had too many games to keep exclusively playing KotOR 2, although I might finish it anyway since most of those games are action games and a little RPG interspersed can be refreshing.
So I started playing Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. The tutorial that the game starts with made me want to stop playing the game and break the CD against a wall, as it exemplified everything that the reviewers had said was wrong with it -- the focus on combat instead of platforming, the dark gritty tone, the silly Heavy Metal fashion sense of the girls, and the (small-h) heavy metal soundtrack. Plus, a REALLY FREAKING DIFFICULT BOSS. In the tutorial. It took me about ten tries to get past her, and I was screaming and complaining and yelling during it...
I finally figured out that to have a fighting chance against her, you needed to go get the manual and look up the command to pick up a second weapon, then fiddle around until you found the command to *actually* pick up the second weapon, since it was listed incorrectly. With a second weapon, her health bar no longer seemed ridiculously long, since you did about twice as much damage, and the battle turned from 'freaking impossible' to merely 'way to hard for a tutorial'. But I got past.
The game after that hideously bad (and as far as I can tell, unskippable) tutorial sequence was a lot better, meaning that (so far at least) it's more like the original. The map is worse than useless, though, since it provides no useful information (it's an artist's conception of the island from sooo far above that no recognizable features can be made out) and the missions seem to think that it should, and tell you to find a place by putting a mark on the unreadable map. Usually, two marks. One of them is presumably the goal, the other is certainly *not* where you are, since it never moves during a mission.
Enough ranting, though.
So I started playing Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. The tutorial that the game starts with made me want to stop playing the game and break the CD against a wall, as it exemplified everything that the reviewers had said was wrong with it -- the focus on combat instead of platforming, the dark gritty tone, the silly Heavy Metal fashion sense of the girls, and the (small-h) heavy metal soundtrack. Plus, a REALLY FREAKING DIFFICULT BOSS. In the tutorial. It took me about ten tries to get past her, and I was screaming and complaining and yelling during it...
I finally figured out that to have a fighting chance against her, you needed to go get the manual and look up the command to pick up a second weapon, then fiddle around until you found the command to *actually* pick up the second weapon, since it was listed incorrectly. With a second weapon, her health bar no longer seemed ridiculously long, since you did about twice as much damage, and the battle turned from 'freaking impossible' to merely 'way to hard for a tutorial'. But I got past.
The game after that hideously bad (and as far as I can tell, unskippable) tutorial sequence was a lot better, meaning that (so far at least) it's more like the original. The map is worse than useless, though, since it provides no useful information (it's an artist's conception of the island from sooo far above that no recognizable features can be made out) and the missions seem to think that it should, and tell you to find a place by putting a mark on the unreadable map. Usually, two marks. One of them is presumably the goal, the other is certainly *not* where you are, since it never moves during a mission.
Enough ranting, though.
