In Canabalt, you jump or you die. It’s that simple. When you think about it.

But Canabalt doesn’t give you much time to think. You have no control over your avatar’s movements in the game besides jumping. He is already running. Your responsibility as the player is to make sure he jumps. There is one button in this game. It can be picked up by anyone. The only difficulty curve is learning to overcome your own lack of patience to wait until that perfect second to execute the jump. There are no pretenses of depth that only end up disappointing.

The game starts in what appears to be an office building. Your avatar is wearing a suit. He starts to run. The window you jump through accents the beginning of what will most certainly be a daring escape.

The entire time you are playing Canabalt, you are gripped with fear of the unknown. Will you make the next jump? Will you escape destruction? And where is it you are escaping to? But there isn’t enough time to contemplate the incongruities of this game. You have to run. You have to jump. Freedom awaits. Or more buildings.

I could say I had visions of Out of this World (Another World) and Flashback while playing this game. The simple, yet effective artwork and smooth animations bear enough of a resemblance. But in truth I couldn’t stop thinking about F-Zero GX ^[1], and the billboards throughout the game that tell you to “GO FAST”. The obnoxious guitar-laced techno always thumping in the background, constantly pressing you forward.

Canabalt is the same. Like some other iPhone/iPod Touch games, it allows you to listen to your own music while playing. But to do that would be a mistake. Before the game starts, Semi-Secret advises players that headphones supply the best experience for their game. They’re right about that.

There is only one piece of music in this game^[2] . It starts off quiet, then develops into the same abrasive techno from F-Zero GX. You can’t help but feel prodded by the music, letting it affect your decisions. A high, long jump when it gets loud seems only fitting. Then it gets quiet again. But you don’t want to slow down; you can’t slow down.

The more you run, the more momentum builds up. The soundtrack complements everything that happens on screen. It is essential to the experience. Every single footstep can be heard. Stone, metal, and then glass breaking as you leap through a window across another gap between buildings.

Semi-Secret Software didn’t really have to do that, you know. There is no purpose to breaking through windows or the delectable tinkling sound of falling glass that results. It is the only thing in Canabalt that feels gratuitous; It’s embellishment for the urgency of your escape. Clearly you will stop at nothing – not even a full-story pane of glass – to get away.

Then there are other obtacles. Sometimes you have to hit them to slow down for a short jump before a long one. Sometimes undetonated bombs fall from the sky. You have to jump over them, or they explode when you hit them. Despite the urgency to keep moving at all costs, Canabalt makes you think ahead. You dread what’s coming. You don’t want to ruin a good run.

The buildings are random. Sometimes the gaps seem like they are getting bigger. You learn that holding on to a jump even for a split second more extends the airtime.

The whole time you are running, there is a war going on in the distance. More likely it’s an invasion. You never find out. It brings to mind the tripods from War of the Worlds and Half Life 2. These silhouettes are purposefully placed out of focus, so you can never pay full attention to what is happening. There is a more important task at hand: survival.

The most revealing feature of this game is the lack of a pause button^[3]. You are running for your life, away from some unknown force that will surely kill you if your death-defying stunts don’t. The only thing left is your life. This is an all-or-nothing gamble. There are no breaks. There is no stopping. You either make the next jump, or you die.

I’ve seen Canabalt labelled as one of 2009’s “indie darlings.” The criticism that naturally follows such attention has focused on its lack of producing an experience of any significance; it’s too short. Aside from the initial novelty, there is no reason a person needs to pick this game up more than once. They would be wrong. There is a reason.

Canabalt is a game of the simplest philosophy, hearkening back to the days where “High Score” actually meant something^[4]. Success is easily quantified. There is no secret there: to go farther, you must get better at the game. Anyone can grasp this concept. The failure condition is equally simple: you die. But even here the game has something to say, because you don’t just fall into a chasm. You hit the brick wall of your skill level. Canabalt wants you to do better.

With enough patience, Canabalt can last forever. And you want it to last forever. As long as that character is running across the screen, you are alive. You go on because you must.

Or you die.

With Borderlands, a game described as a “role-playing shooter”, developers Gearbox hope to capture the audience that spends many sleepless nights wandering through forgotten strongholds while pillaging corpses and undefended treasure chests. They want to make the grind of the modern Fantasy role-playing game appealing to those repulsed by the thought of more swords and sorcery and Siberian tiger mounts. Gearbox is going post-apocalyptic wasteland on this formula. They’re going to make this grind cool.

Borderlands is influenced by games that are second jobs thinly veiled as “entertainment.” There are enough trappings in most that the player does not immediately recognize it until they are separated from the system. Maybe the rewards are frequent enough; the increase in character abilities more steady and immediately gratifying. But Gearbox fails to dress up Borderlands to hide from the player the laborious byproduct of the genre. As a result, Borderlands merely resembles a mechanical facsimile of its influences.

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Prototype is excess. It is what happens when game designers grow up with American comic books post-comics code and the type of Japanese animation that is more interested in overblown displays of power than telling a story. It is a game with rules that are designed to be broken at every turn. The player is rewarded for brazen and barbaric tactics. In Prototype, there are too many abilities and limitless power, yet no loyalty to an ideal. Like X-Men’s Dark Phoenix, Alex Mercer is granted godlike status with no one to stand in his way. The game revels in bloodshed and in selfish pursuits that amount to little more than breadcrumbs on the trail of some government conspiracy. Prototype is advertised as a “superhero” video game. But Alex Mercer is no hero. He isn’t even an anti-hero. He is a plague on humanity. And at the end of it all, after everything he has wreaked upon the city of New York, this descriptor proves to be the most accurate.

After a few hours of play, Prototype will come across as a patchwork of unfinished concepts. On the one hand, it offers up such a varied selection of powers and skills that it will suit any playing style, and in theory adds levels of complexity to completing the tasks that are presented to the player. Yet on the other, Prototype provides two completely overpowered vehicles that will get any job done a lot faster, without the strategic use of Alex’s talents. This is a game that needs rules put in place. While I wanted to figure out other ways to approach Prototype’s challenges, the winning strategy was to cause enough havoc to summon a strike team, and then steal their vehicles. Aside from some fairly engaging boss battles where vehicles were not options, the challenge in Prototype is the player’s own restraint.

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This is the second part of a two-part review of Prince of Persia (2008) and the “Epilogue” (2009) downloadable content. There are spoilers, but you already knew that. This review examines the “Epilogue” adventure and its relationship with the original game. The review of the original game can be read in Part 1.

Whether fans of Prince of Persia (2008) want to accept it or not, Epilogue (2009) is canon. At its core, it is a meandering journey through the corrupted Underground Palace that adds neither depth to the original story, nor game mechanics of any real consequence to the original game^[1]. So what was the purpose of this new content? The cynical answer to this question would be “to get stupid people to pay for the intended ending to the original game.” And while I can agree with that statement, there are parts of Epilogue that skirt the edges of something great – something that should have formed the basis for the original game. Epilogue implores us to keep the candle burning for this series, in a last-ditch attempt to convince us that UbiSoft hasn’t lost their touch with the franchise they resurrected so successfully six years ago. Prince of Persia (2008) was just the beginning; we can expect more from the obviously planned sequels. Except Epilogue fails to convince us that there is anything worth waiting for.

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This is the first part of a two-part review of Prince of Persia (2008) and the “Epilogue” (2009) downloadable content. There are spoilers, but you already knew that. Taking UbiSoft Montreal’s intentions at face value one should be able to review both as a complete game, but I don’t think it would be fair to the intent of the original…but I’m getting ahead of myself.

When I finished Prince of Persia (2008), I was left feeling incredibly disheartened. The game’s ending made me question what I had been spending the last seven hours trying to achieve; it basically undoes everything you have been setting out to do for the entire game. But I did not feel frustrated; rather, I felt the ending was necessary – and the game brilliantly makes you a willing participant in this sequence of events. It does not give you a choice because it is something that you know, deep down, needs to be done. Prince of Persia is not an action game. It is barely an adventure game. It is a roleplaying game without the choice and the number crunching and the inventory management. You are given the role of the reluctant hero, thrust into a situation that clearly requires significant physical and emotional investment, and ultimately tasked with making a decision that has but a single response.

As a storytelling device, Prince of Persia excels. In fact, if this was a review for an interactive storybook, Prince of Persia would be the best and most beautiful interactive storybook of 2008, The End. But it is not. It is a video game.

As a video game, Prince of Persia leaves me wondering whether this is yet another milestone on the road towards the future of video games that I have come to dread. It leaves far too much out of the hands of the player, and instead relies on a few button presses to initiate the marvelous acrobatic moves that take place on screen in the march towards an inevitable conclusion. Prince of Persia manifests every video game enthusiast’s complaint about linearity and player freedom. And because it is so overt, it is identified as the greatest fault committed by this game.

Should Prince of Persia be held to a different standard because it simply illustrates what we all know is true about video games that rely on narrative? The way it showcases the story as the main driver behind the action is no different than the most linear of first person shooters, but there is a degree of skill involved in running whatever gauntlet a FPS would present. Prince of Persia is flexible in its controls, easily forgives failure, and yet when it tries to offer complexity in the form of Player-initiated exploration and a structured combo system for combat, they are in such sharp contrast as to be superfluous to the game’s design. Prince of Persia is in constant struggle with what is expected of it, and what it wants to achieve. And the game ultimately suffers for it.

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