All this hoo haw and faw faroo about the need for a new videogame criticism. Let us take the form beyond mere technical details about frame rates and such and create something informed not by triflings point of view or listing features, comparing, doling out technical details in a dry manner, but through a critical aesthetics of the emotional of cut scenes. We are undaunted by the lack of such criticism for traditional games. Chess writings, in their analyses of openings, middle and end games are unrelentingly technical, in a way no discussion of frame rate could ever hope to be. We must have a strong analytical toolkit not bound by the old style. And so shall we be moved by Max Payne's plight, a family eradicated in a drug-induced frenzy by our arch nemesis, the street thug.
Prince of Persia, in title a tribute to A Flock of Seagulls, should be known as Ico with Swords. Like Ico, all action takes place in a single location, a mystical castle. The game follows the quest of a pair to reach a particular part of the castle. In Ico, a young horned boy and magical girl who spoke some unknown language were trying to reach the exit. In PoP, a Persian prince and Indian princess, both speaking English, seek out a particular tower where the villain, shown in an early cutscene, has hidden a large hourglass, the mystical powers of which have turned the raj's taj's denizens into sand zombies. The castle's citizens must have been clones of some strange device, as there are perhaps three men endlessly replicated throughout the environment. There was also only one woman, a tall, tarty knifeslinger a la Elektra. That's the comic book Elektra, not the Greek Elektra.
Like Ico, the castle has a unity, it is one place that persists through the game and its geometry is not violated, no matter how illogical or historically inaccurate. The game also attempts, early in the story, to explain the functions of various rooms and features of the environment in terms of the castle's practical nature. The various swinging blades one must dodge are part of the defense system. The switches thrown to unlock new rooms are part of the security system, allowing free access to the castle only to those who know the layout of the switches, or to a fellow acrobatic and crafty enough to find them on his own.
At this point, you surely have the genre in mind. You go from room to room, solve some basic puzzles to allow you access to the next room. It's like Zelda. Or it's like Doom and the like, dungeon crawlers in geography if not in point of view or gunpowder awareness. We are tired of your bourgeois pigeonholing of games and the excruciating criticism which is so reliant on an intimate knowledge of the rote list of canon styles and games. We shit defiantly on the old order.
One typically asinine criticism of Prince of Persia comes from ign, bloated tyrant of ludography. In it, they compare the game to Ico, noting that in both games you have a female companion, but that PoP's actually serves a purpose other than bringing you down, man, if by you we mean rather your polygonal avatar, the horned boy. Such sexist nonsense. As players of Ico well know, your female companion opens the gateways to all the new rooms in the castle, the opening of which completely eradicates the shadowy villains of the dark. Clearly, the ign reviewer can only see the arrrows that the the princess in PoP shoots, for to him there is no true action but penetration.
Which reminds me. In the George Pal movie version of War of the Worlds (I have not read the original, and my memory of a once heard Welles version, from a wow and fluttered tape copy on loan from the library, is not perfect), a scientist tries to describe the otherness of aliens by giving some fantastic examples. He speculates that Martians may "smell" the color red. In retrospect, this seems less a scientific speculation and more a zen koan. Red is what we call color of a particular wavelength. The experience of sensing red is intrinsic to sight. It is impossible to smell red, as smelling is the detection of gas with no regard to any light it may emit. An odor equivalent of chiaroscuro.
Posted by mattb at January 02, 2004 11:02 PM