A Prince for Everyone

Recently Michael Abbott over at the wonderful Brainy Gamer organized a symposium for discussing the new Prince of Persia. I was pretty stoked when I discovered this because first of all I love his site and all of his friends game discussions, but more importantly the Sands of Time trilogy ranks very high among my favorite games ever. Yes, even Warrior Within, though it is without a doubt the weakest in the series. This obviously leaves me fairly biased towards the discussion of the new game, but luckily I’m not writing this to discuss how much I liked the game.

The Brainy Gamer posted this article back when Braid came out this summer. He was commenting on how all his non-gamer friends loved the opening of Braid and wanted to experience all it had to offer. They couldn’t of course because Braid requires a previous knowledge of video games that can only be acquired from the years we all spent playing games. Certain unspoken rules are there that us as gamers don’t have to think twice about, but would never cross a non-gamers mind. From what I understand several incredibly avid gamers even had problems beating all the puzzles in there. Not me of course, but my skills needn’t be discussed. ;)

Braid would have been a great game to show the world what games are capable of, if only the world was capable of playing it. That’s where Prince of Persia comes in. PoP has the beautiful graphics, the awesome atmosphere and excellent score that Braid has. It also has the narrative and ending to inspire a huge dialogue, regardless of if you liked the story. Most importantly it has what Braid never even wanted to have, accessibility. Several gamers cite this as a negative, but this is the game we should be showing all our non-gamer friends in an attempt to get them to experience what we do. Interestingly, Mr. Abbott’s friends ended up choosing PoP as their universal favorite after his holiday get together. I assume at least some of them are the same friends that couldn’t break into Braid.

Prince of Persia is a great step in the right direction for expanding the gaming audience in a way the Wii hasn’t really provided. If that requires the sacrifice of displeasing a few hardcore gamers, I’m sorry to say I think that’s a fair trade. Besides, it sounds like several of the hardcore were happy to jump aboard. I certainly was.