Serious gaming is serious work. And I’m not talking about NSTL BREW testers here. I’m talking about gamers. Being not so ambidextrous in real life (as against my virtual avataar), I have always found playing TV games a bit of a pain. Something that requires too much hand-eye coordination…basically just too much tedious, mind-and-finger-numbing work. A bit of an irony here, since that’s what I earn my living from. (Well, not really). Or so I thought until, I met my knight in shining armor, or rather, my prince of Persia.It so happens that I grew up with the PC versions of most popular game titles today: Mortal Kombat, Doom, and other beat-the-opponents-life-to-pulp games. Not something I enjoy doing very much even though it’s thrilling to see Kano (one of the characters in Mortal Kombat) wrench out a heart out of his not-so-lucky adversary’s ribs. (Ouch…I’m so evil it hurts). Back to nostalgia, as I was saying, I grew up with rather duller, plainer, 2-D versions of all these games and do not once remember having to watch a 2 minute movie before the start of every level.
These days of course, we are forbidden to start pressing 100 keys at a time, hoping that one of them would work wonders, before watching the story enfold before us. I always thought the antagonist, namely this prince of Persia was in search of true love, looking for his first kiss, with the princess behind several 2-D shimmering curtains…well, not any more. The prince has become more hip and definitely more materialistic; he’s now in search of untold riches, scheming viziers and blood-sucking bugs. He’s now endowed with the gravity-defying abilities that would put Neo’s famous matrix action sequences to shame, and a time-stretching dagger that would give any self-respecting time traveler an inferiority complex. The concept is just mind-blowing. After some effort at trying to press all the keys on the controller at the same time, I finally got the much treasured “sands-of-time” dagger; only to learn that I had covered only 5% of the game so far…it really felt like an eternity (pun not intended). The game’s screenplay is so sympathetic to gamers like me, that since if the prince who is the narrator of the story falls off a treacherous cliff and dies for the nth time; the voice-over says “No, no…that's not how it happened. Let me start over."
Gamers have this tendency to take things playing games rather seriously, which is kind of scary. I mean, there are threads and threads of discussions over what the colors of the princess’s headdress should have been, and how the principal storyline should be based in Persia (now Iran) rather than the countless references to India. But being so meticulous, they tend to document everything very painstakingly. And I owe them a million pixels for this. I’m talking about the walkthroughs, without which I would be like a gamer without opposable thumbs. Being so new to the world of gaming, (here’s where my years of naïveté come to bite me), I never venture out to jump up like a monkey to the next column to clamber to the next level of the game. So here I am, supposedly playing on the PS2, with a browser window open waiting to be googled for the next step in the rather long process of winning the emerald/princess with untold riches/Persian loot with the sands of time from India. In fact, even I admit it rather sheepishly; I have a printout of a particularly difficult puzzle at the 11% mark in the puzzle to help me get to the 12% mark. The walkthrough does not have fine print stating the fact that listing the percentage mark figure next to each specific step just might make a raw gamer’s life a little more daunting not to mention disheartening. Plus, counter in the fact that I’ve been playing this game for two weeks now.
- Written for the internal NSTL newsletter (Aug. 2004)
