“I’m in, it’s time to win.” — This is obviously a fake post, there’s no iPhone 4 here, not in India, anyway. Move along now.
BACKGROUND: Well, I saw Prince of Persia: Sands of Time the day it was released. I was not expecting anything good. What I was expecting a Max Payne to happen with the film. It did not happen. The movie was a generally fun fare with cheeky references to the game and a decent enough story to boot and some great CGI. Then I saw this article written Tim Robey of The Daily Telegraph who obviously did not play the game. The article is here (May 29th edition of T2, Page 7 “It Vaults the Silliness Bar”. The beautifully and aesthetically designed webpage needs you to to register to see some pragmatic and wonderous bit of epaper programming). I sent this letter, but they didn’t haven’t published it yet.
The Letter:
Dear T2,
I am in your deepest debt when it comes to movie reviews. I can trust your reviews completely and utterly - from the opposite end. You see, whenever there’s a review in T2 that says that a movie is semi-trash (e.g. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time), I can blindly waltz into the movie hall and watch a generally fun and decently made movie. Moreover, when your reviews state that some movie is unimaginably awesome, and in general something that the world has never seen before (e.g. Slumdog Millionaire) I can avoid it like it’s infected with a mutated kind of plague that turns my kidneys into overgrown ulcers. (Yes I did not think thatSlumdog Millionaire was the greatest movie of last year. I also do not think that A.R. Rahaman deserves an award for that movie. He has done far better work. So has Danny Boyle, in fact - *points at Trainspotting*)
Coming back to the point of your reviews - I’m sure that you have a casual gamer who is also a reviewer - who is (this is important) also not lazy. The movie released yesterday, and today you have a review from a jolly good British lad who has no idea of fun. (I’m sure there was a bad case of childhood at work over there with Mr. T. Robey of The Daily Telegraph.) You could’ve easily asked one of your staff reporters to walk into a multiplex in the morning and write up a review by the afternoon.
For a movie that I had very low expectations from (I have seen far too many of my well-loved game franchises ruined by cinematic transitions) Sands of Time delivered a generally watchable movie that fluidly moves from scene to scene akin to the Pirates of the Caribbean series. It’s not the greatest movie of all time, it’s not the awesomestestestest [sic] movie I’ve ever seen - but it works. I’d give it a 7/10.Also, if you sincerely feel the need to copy/”reproduce” reviews, head over to IMDB.com and search for the reviews of the movie you want “reviewed”. Take the average of the reviews that give the movie a rating of 10 and 0 (or 9 and 1, or 8 and 2 and so on) and spin up a review around it. It should theoretically work.
In all seriousness, I’m sure you people are a great bunch and are capable of writing up good reviews on your own. Please do not reproduce reviews from other newspapers - especially those from The Daily Telegraph. On a further note - please do your own reviews for English movies as well. And as far as possible, do ensure that people who want to watch the movie are sent - otherwise we readers get pear-shaped reviews.
Thank you.
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It’s a Rickshaw :)
Doing mathematics now :P
[Originally from here]
Well this will be a long post, so bear with it. (Also, you asked for it :P)
Everything is a blur before 2002, generally speaking. For me, my formative years from 5-12 are all a mash of memories with no clear winner amongst the brighter ones. I remember I used to play Dangerous Dave, Prince of Persia and Skyroads in my parents’ office when I was 5 or 6. I could never beat Prince of Persia, but the others were fun and kept me playing. I remember there was one uncle who was (for that time) a pro gamer who used to beat Prince of Persia in 35 minutes (as far as I remember, the time limit was 60 minutes)
Circa 1997, I believe we bought our first computer for a massive amount of money for its time. It was a Pentium I 333MHz god-knows-what-RAM (I did not pay attention, honestly) and I distinctly remember 333 MHz because there were LED lights in front of the cabinet that said so. It ran Windows 95 and I ran Wolfenstein 3D (better known by its exe name Wolf3D) on it. Believe it or not – my mum was instrumental in getting me into games – she specifically brought Wolfenstein from her office and installed it! Doom, Quake and others were soon to follow – but they did not have impact that two of my cherished games would.
Those two were Planescape: Torment and, a year later, Age of Empires II. I believe the years were 1999 and 2000 respectively. Both were radically different (one was AD&D RPG and the other was an RTS) and both are held in high regard in my eyes. The fact remains that though I have completely forgotten Torment (I remember nothing – coincidentally, neither does the protagonist! :P) and (though I used to pride my memory at the time) I do not remember the tech/unit-tree of my favourite civilization, the Britons (I remember why they are my favourites though – they had LONGBOWMEN!)
Cut to 2003 – I am thirteen and in class 8. Three more of my favourite games of all time landed up on my doorstep. I believe the order was Baldur’s Gate II: SoA, Warcraft III and, of course, Diablo II. I heard Black Isle had developed BGII so I got it from a friend. Warcraft III was procured after seeing the animations, skills and whatever not from blizzard.com and Diablo II was procured in exchange for Warcraft III from someone who’d go on to become one of my closest friends in school. I remember we used to spend hours and hours of the lunch break discussing either Sorceress/Necromancer skills OR what a bitch Andariel was because she killed our <insert level here> heroes in <insert any amount of time less than 120 seconds here> (I still think she was the toughest boss I had to face. In contrast, Diablo looked like a dog and acted like one too – not scary). Otherwise, we’d discuss Night Elf tactics (he’d discuss Orc tactics – we never got along in Warcraft III :P). Just a couple of months ago we decided to play D2 co-op, but never got around to doing that because the game decided not to play in Windows 7 :/.
Two other games I played in the midst of all this (and have forgotten because they were played in and around some tough times) were Fallout and Fallout 2. At that point of time I started playing them just because they were developed by Black Isle – Planescape: Torment made a heavy impression on me. Needless to say, it only doubled (and tripled) my love for Black Isle. It’s funny that I played almost all (haven’t played Icewind Dale yet) of Black Isle’s games and I only found out that I truly love them some years after they disbanded.
After that, one of my biggest achievements was saving up money for Neverwinter Nights: Platinum and buying it in class 11/12. I remember that my DVD drive was not installed because of the two slots for the optical drives, one was not functioning and the other had a CD-writer in it. I remember I uninstalled the writer and installed the DVD-ROM during a powercut while it was raining heavily outside. Brilliant day! I played through NWN twice and I keep coming back to the third expansion module – Hordes of the Underdark. It’s pretty much the best memory I have of an expansion that was done beautifully. It had a long and dark story, some very different missions and lasting impact that I find scarce in modern games.
And that’s that. I don’t think I will go into details of Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, The Witcher and (recently) my girlfriend’s gift of Dragon Age: Origins. That’s left for another question ;)
P.S. I think I’ve confused what your question meant. BUT I GOT TO TALK ABOUT GAMES. So yeah. :P
There was an interesting comment on the thread of Execution - an experimental 2MB game. It had everything to do with the entire mechanic of this game.
Whatever bit I say about it will spoil the game for you, so I won’t. 2D Cube has come up with one interesting game and concept. Do extract and play.
And if you want to know what that interesting thing was, mail me. =P
(via threeframes)
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