Before you start thinking I have shitty tastes AND it has taken no more than a week for this blog to go off topic, let me explain.

It was one of those nights when my roommate is playing a game and I have nothing better to do than to watch. He mostly plays consoles. I mostly… don’t play much anymore, but when I do it’s on the PC. That night he was cast in the role of the Prince of Persia on the Playstation 3. It had been maybe a week since he had started…

I have this ability, or problem, that allows me to watch someone play a video game for hours on end without even feeling like taking control. Mind you, I was a CS manager at some point. So I was watching him play, hours at a time, when I started telling myself this game had some good points. I mean, I only had heard bad stuff about it so I was a bit intrigued.

SIDENOTE In a way it’s true that Ubisoft kind of choked the series. Or almost did. I think they even at some point recognized they had been too greedy when they decided to release back to back Prince of Persia games, or something like that. That’s one of the main differences between a Ubisoft and a Blizzard by the way: I’ve been waiting for the next Starcraft for 12 years, Ubisoft got the world fed up with Prince of Persia in 3. /SIDENOTE

The original Prince of Persia on PC

Not a bad game

The game has its good sides. Art direction is pretty good, for one. The game looks gorgeous. And they’re trying to make it fun too with a laid back hero dropping ironical lines all the way. Not that it’s necessarily succeeding in that, but it’s trying at least.

Technically speaking, it’s clean too. I didn’t drop my jaw over it either. It’s a PS3, lots of horsepower in there, and the game doesn’t have the Uncharted 2 type of bling bling. But it works, it’s not buggy, it doesn’t have weird collisions that I can remember of… You know, stuff like that is ok.

No, where the game is a liability is gameplay. Super boring isn’t strong enough to describe the feeling… you basically do two things: climbing and jumping. And fighting too. Ok that’s 3 things.

Yet a good way to put it is that if you play Super Mario Galaxy or World of Goo after a long PoP PS3 stint, you might feel like you just got outta jail after 15 years (actually, you want to try this at home, it’s synthesizing happiness).

Told you it looked nice

Art, Tech and Gameplay

That’s how it all got started. Gamocracy, I mean.

Right there, I had just made my own review of the game, in my head. I had heard here and there about this game being bad, I couldn’t even tell you where. You know how these things are. But here, that was my opinion: this game has very good art, above average technical performance and poor gameplay.

Art, Tech and Gameplay. It’s a pretty simple way to judge a game but it’s efficient. You need that to make a system work.

Under this system…
… a Tetris would get the maximum in gameplay, average in tech and the minimum in art, or maybe a bit more for the hypnotic music
… a Starcraft would get right under the maximum in gameplay, right under the maximum in art and a little less in tech: it’s not much of a technical show off, but it works perfectly and there’s battle.net
… a World of Goo would get about the same as Starcraft
… and so on

I can’t remember how I made the jump from this to that, but I started thinking it’d be nice to let anyone speak their minds about games in such a way. And let other people know about it too. It’s something you can do in our times, if you build a website! The principle would be (now that we’re here, just weeks away from releasing the closed beta, it still is) that anyone could come and review games and we would find a way to make the best reviews, not the ones that give the best scores, those that are flagged as the most accurate by readers, get on top of lists.

Having just 3 grades for Art, Tech and Gameplay wasn’t enough for a review though. Some editorial input would be needed too. The day after, when I sat down to watch my roommate playing PoP PS3, that’s what I started thinking about.