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Editorials   New Cube Owners, Vol. 12
- By Lander Clinton

Since Nintendo recently sold in one weekend roughly the same number of GameCubes it sold at launch, I thought I'd do a little something for all the new Cube owners out there.

Everyday until I run out of ideas, forget, or am too busy playing a game, I'll update a GameCube game you must own and why you must own it.

Here goes:

Whoops, it's getting kinda late and South Park is coming on soon, so I'll make this one brief.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time does right what so many games do wrong. Instead of always having switch and block puzzles like many adventure games, it has fail-and-you-die puzzles. Instead of limbs disappearing through walls and giving small objects no substance, how about spot-on collision detection where the Prince can put one foot up on an object while the other stays on the ground? Instead of relying on FMVs to tell the story, how about forwarding the tale through realistic dialog and learning as you go? At one point the Prince even acknowledges that he's just making it all up as he goes, and that makes this game extremely believable.

And instead of The Artist currently known as Prince, (the artist formerly known as "The Artist," the artist formerly known as "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince," the artist formerly known as "Prince") how about a Prince who actually does rock? This Prince can do acrobatic feats not seen since Mario, except he doesn't live in the Mushroom Kingdom, he lives in the real world and still pulls them off.

You'll use these moves to make it past the hundreds of deadly traps in the game's main castle, where the majority of the game takes place. If you screw up, you can use the sands of time to rewind your mistake and try again.

There are two things that mar an otherwise totally satisfying game. One, it's a little too short. For me the perfect time for a game is about 30 hours. Anything more and it just drags on, anything less and you feel like you've been ripped off. My Prince of Persia save says it took me just under 10 hours, NOT counting times when I died or had to try again, and that did happen fairly frequently. The other main problem is that between the puzzle sections are fighting sections, and while the fighting system is pretty advanced for this type of game, it feels like it was thrown in because they knew the game was too short. By the end you'll be fighting continuous barrages of monsters until you feel you just have nothing left to prove in combat, but it still makes you fight more and more.

So on that, I'm going to end this. Yes the graphics are superb, the music always appropriate, and the puzzles well thought-out, but the game's a little short and the fighting can get repetitive. It's up to you if you want to go get it!