Tolen Mar

After a frustrating bout of brain lock, when I was unable to manage wall jumps, I finished Prince of Persia: Sands of Time over the course of three days.

My initial experience of this game was rocky. To wit, the game wouldn’t work. The Prince would just run off to the right of the screen and not go anywhere else. After buying another copy of the game under the mistaken assumption that my copy was defective, I figured out that my official PS2 DVD remote was causing the problem. Apparently, the infra-red dongle that plugs into the second controller port interfered with the game. You’d think that QA would have picked up on this detail.

Oh, well, I ended up trading in my extra copy of PoP for Champions of Norrath, which more than makes up for it.

But enough history! On to the game!

Everything you may have heard about the art in the game is true – this is a beautiful game. The character motions are fluid, the vistas sprawling, and the designers have done an excellent job managing light and shadow. Kudos.

The gameplay divides neatly into two varieties: wall-leaping puzzle solving, where you have to have to make your way to different points in the castle using ledges, columns, flagpoles and arcane devices; and combat, where zombies appear out of thin air and attack you ad infinitum. The Prince combats these monsters with a series of flips, wall jumps and scimitar flourishes.

The third element of the game is time itself. Thanks to the Dagger of Time, the Prince can reverse the flow of time, slow down time for enhanced attacks, or freeze enemies in time. Reversing time is the most useful, because it allows a set number of “lives” or “undos,” which is important when the Prince misses a difficult jump across a broken bridge. Freezing enemies is essential for some of the tougher enemies in combat.

You can recharge your Dagger with sand taken from sand pits scattered across the castle, or from fallen zombies. In fact, the zombies respawn if you don’t use the Dagger to destroy them, either by freezing or draining.

Overall, I enjoyed the puzzle aspect of the game the most. Discovering hidden paths and dodging the various traps makes for good gameplay. The combat was insufficiently varied to be interesting – there are only a few types of zombies, only three techniques to defeat them, and the only real difference between difficulty levels is the number of waves of zombies that attack. They just keep coming and coming until they’re all dispatched, yet I found this to be both aggravating and boring. “Not again!” I’d think when I heard the tell-tale sound of zombies appearing in the room.

The Prince’s banter with the Princess, his rival/sidekick/love interest is very amusing. She keeps sassing him for being slow on the uptake, or having a heavy hand with reversing time. Since Dina does these same things when she watches me play (“Look over there! Why aren’t you fighting? Pick up that thing? Why did you fall? You’re not very good at this.”), I can’t help but laugh.

I also got a kick out of the last 10% of the game, where I’m forced to play without the Dagger of Time. So, I have no capacity to rewind time during the puzzles, but I find a superior scimitar to compensate for the lack of enemy-freezing during combat. I laughed, because I very often wasted all the sand in the Dagger at the start of the earlier puzzle sequences, and was forced to play through without hope of rewinding. Losing the Dagger wasn’t an extra challenge – it was more of the same.

I doubt very much the designers planned the final levels around my particular playing “style.”

Apparently, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time was a bit of a sales disappointment, despite the critical acclaim. The sequel is due out before Christmas, and the designers have decided to make the Prince grim ‘n gritty. From the demo footage I’ve seen, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within features more elegant, but far bloodier combat. Sure, the enemies are still demons, but the Prince has a variety of decapitation and evisceration and cleaving techniques that stand in stark contrast to the style of the first game.

I’m not eighteen, so splatter for splatter’s sake doesn’t interest me. I may give the game a rental just to see if I can turn off the gore and enjoy the darker story, but, if not, I won’t feel as if I’m missing anything.

After much delay, I popped Sly Cooper back into the PS2 and continued the game. Now, after defeating all the bosses, I have completed 66% of the game.

The remaining third of the game involves going back to each of the levels and collecting all the hidden clue bottles and retrieving power-ups from the various combination vaults. Not having done so means that I managed to complete the game without any of these power-ups, which is certainly a pleasant surprise!

I don’t think I’ll spend a lot of time going back and redoing some of those levels just to ramp up my completion percentage. Heck, I’ve done almost everything that I can do for Spider-Man 2, and I think I’ve barely cracked the 50% mark.

I was very impressed with Sly. It’s a collection of episodes, with each episode containing a couple of mini-games. There are the standard stealth missions, where Sly leaps, climbs and creeps through the level to pick up the keys that he needs, but here are also car races, and cover-fire games where Sly mans a gun turret and clears a path for his buddy, Murray. You can attempt these different missions in any order, but you will have to complete them all in order to advance.

After defeating the boss of each level, Sly gains a new basic stealth power, which, of course, he needs for the next level. So, Sly learns how to hop from point to point, slide down rails, and even turn invisible to searchlights, lasers and enemies. In the later levels, all the stealth skills are required in combination, which makes for an entertaining ride.

The fifth and final level breaks the general pattern, though. The player has to run through the levels in a set order. The levels also appear to be timed (no, there’s nothing so obvious as a countdown timer). I also found that I could cheat my way through one of the stealth levels – which is not to say that it wasn’t challenging – by not following the prescribed path, as well as cheating my way through one of the shooting levels by sticking to the bottom of the screen and shooting the enemy just off-screen.

I have to offer kudos to the sound designers on the game. I found the sounds during the final boss fight to be so unsettling that I had to play with the sound muted just to get through. Talk about total engagement! Good work, ladies and gentlemen.

The only downside to the game would have to be its length. Even with the year-long gap between playing sessions, I cleared three levels in as many afternoons. That’s not an awful lot of gameplay for the money (though, to be fair, I did pick this game up for ten bucks at a one-day-only Futureshop sale), but the game is so polished it gleams.

I’ve already seen the demo version of Sly 2, and they seemed to put more emphasis on fighting rather than stealth puzzles. But that could just be the demo. I’ll probably rent the sequel and see what it’s like.

I had created these optional rules for the local Montreal playgroup based on some proposed rules changes by Iron Crown Enterprises before they lost the license to produce Middle-Earth gaming products.

League Rules & Rulings
These are the official Tolen Mar League Rules and accepted optional rules from all the MECCG rulebooks and rule inserts. No other optional rules are in effect during Tolen Mar League games. (Note: The League Rules have changed based on the Rules Survey. Rules 7 and 9 have been stricken. Official League games will follow the appropriate Council of Lorien rules.

League Rules (2000)

1. No Balrogs: Unless specified by the tournament director, no Balrog players may participate in General Opponent tournaments.

2. Active Conditions: Characters may not be used as active conditions during the movement/hazard or site phases unless they are in the currently phasing company (e.g. Ioreth at Lorien can’t play Marvels Told on behalf of a company at Moria), or unless specifically allowed to by a card (e.g. Hoarmurath Unleashed or Eye Never Sleeping).

3. Characters: Characters may be brought into play at Home or Haven if there is enough direct or general influence to control them, regardless of the location of the Wizard/Ringwraith/Fallen-Wizard.

4. Character Draft: Players roll dice. High roller chooses whether to draft the first character, or take the first turn.

5. Company Limit: There is a limit of 3 companies per player. Ringwraiths at Darkhavens and characters with Await the advent of Allies/Awaiting the Call do not count against the company limit. If a character is split off from a company by the play of a hazard, thereby creating more than the legal number of companies, that character is considered to be “out of play” at its destination site (still counts for uniqueness) , and can only return to play if a legal company goes to that destination site, or when the character can legally count against the company limit (e.g., the character’s original company is eaten by Itangast)

6. Reduced Body: For evey increment of 5 that a strike is successful or fails, the relevant body check is +1. This applies to all combat situations. (e.g. If Itangast beats Bilbo by 15, the body check against Bilbo is +3. If Bilbo beats Itangst by 15, the body check against Itangast is +3). The card “Like the Crash of Battering-Rams” may not be played.

7. Minor Items CANCELLED: One minor item may be played after entering any site. This is the “free” minor item, but may be played even if no resources that tap the site are played. The minor item may be played from the sideboard, hand, or discard pile. Tap a character to play the minor item on that character. This taps the site, if untapped. Minor items that may be discarded for an effect may not be played from the discard pile, and Star-glass may not be played from the sideboard.

8. Movement: There is no starter moment for the purposes of playing hazards. A company may follow the site path listed on a card only if the movement begins/ends at the appropriate Haven, but must identify the regions being used. This does allow a company to get around the normal region limit for movement, as per normal starter movement.

9. Sideboarding CANCELLED: If a company moves and enters a site and plays no resources, the player may tap one character to sideboard one resource into the reserve pile. If a company moves and the hazard player does not play any hazards, the hazard player may sideboard one hazard card into the reserve pile.

10. Reserve Pile: All sideboardng and recycling effects put cards in a reserve pile instead of the draw deck. The free End-of-Turn discard goes into the reserve pile. After your turn, you may shuffle your reserve pile into your deck (which means that if you have cards in your reserve pile as a Hazard player, you cannot reshuffle them into your deck until the end of your Resource player turn).

11. Starting Site: Hero companies may start at Rivendell or Lorien.

12. Weakest Link Method: Not used. Ties stand and earn 3 points for each player.

13. Dice, Maps, and Sites: The tournament director will supply dice to all participants. The director will also supply official MECCG maps and spare site cards for players who require them. Each player’s site deck is assumed to contain one copy of all non-haven sites or all alignments, and an unlimited number of haven sites.

Optional Rules

• Not tapping to remove a corruption card (-3 penalty to roll)

• Company vs Company combat with a Fallen-wizard with more than 10 stage points

• Minion players are not affected by the following cards ONLY: All hazard events that require an agent (save Near to Hear a Whisper, Great Need or Purpose, and Sudden Fury); Bane of the Ithil-stone; The Black Enemy’s Wrath; Foul Fumes; In the Heart of His Realm; Mordor in Arms; Mûmak; Worn and Famished. All other cards are permitted, under the conceptual justification that there’s an inherent danger to working for Sauron

This looks like fun! As the creator writes:

“…possibly the most antagonistic thing you can do with a deck of cards short of making someone eat them.”

The Spooneye! Card Game