It's been a while since I've written anything here, and decided that this was as good a time and opportunity as any :)

I follow Playstation.Blog on Flickr. Simply because well, all their interesting entries have pics and if there are good pics, I go read up on the corresponding entries. The other day while I was casually going through my emails, the daily one from Flickr with the pics uploaded by friends had Prince of Persia on it.

My reactions were something like : Whoa. Hold on. WTF!!! Prince of Persia??? PS3??? Elika???? WHAT!!! and that obviously led to Your Questions Answered : Prince of Persia and then Prince of Persia Review and obviously I wanted to know when the game was coming here....so off to GameScore and voila! December 5th. Bliss.

Obviously, if you're not one/all of these :

1. Gamer


2. From my era (early 80s :p)

you sort of don't understand the excitement or what the big deal about Prince of Persia is :D

Back in the days, when there was DOS, Prince of Persia was the ONE game (apart from say Dangerous Dave or Transport Tycoon) that was on EVERYONE's lips. If you had a computer and you didn't have/play Prince of Persia, you had to be a loser :D Levels were dissected, strategies discussed, cheatcodes revealed...all to save the lovely Princess from the evil Jaffar. I've played so much PoP (yes, typing the whole name is getting painful now :p) that I still remember the theme song and can hum it all out. Insane? Maybe :D

And then I had relatives egging me along. Cousins and Nieces...just to show them how the Prince wins and saves the Princess...and some of them would even cry if the Prince died. Nuts!

So yeah, Prince of Persia is very much a part of my gaming life and life itself..it's something that I cannot forget and that is why I went rushing to Gamescore after work yesterday to pick up PoP for the PS3 on the day of it's release here. And I was blown away by the graphics right at the first level. The scenery, the desert, hills, canyons, the blue sky...just.simply.WOW. Oh and Elika is surely an added bonus. She helps you along and the Prince himself is an easy-go-lucky chap with a ready wisecrack in hand, all the time! The game is no where near the story of the original...and has a little bit of a learning curve. The fighting is just brilliant in terms of visual representation and graphics. I still remember hitting the ctrl key on the old game...haha. In just about 19 years...we've had SO many changes to computers/display systems/controllers and what not, that the first PoP in 1989 and the current version in 2008 are just eons apart.

Gamespot says you can finish the game in 12 hours, I think I'll take a LOT more :) Just soaking in the various scenes and umm there is real life and work in the middle anyway!

Shameless plugs for Gamespot (I've gotten all my games for the PS3 after reading their reviews and I'm yet to be disappointed....every single one has been spot on!) and Gamescore, who've been an excellent source of everything gaming here, atleast for me.

Oh, and I picked up Fallout3 as well. The queue now reads -> Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2 - Ep 1, Half-Life 2 - Ep 2, GTA4, Fallout3 (and more of Portal, Civilization : Revolution) because I think I'll finish PoP before the rest of them :D Time...if only a day had more time ;)

So I finally managed to finish Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows. I'm sure I'm one of the last souls on the planet to have gotten the book on the day it came out and took so long to finish it ;)

I've been on a reading spree actually...all my backlogged books are done and brand new ones are waiting to be read.

Woohoo. More reading.

Apart from reading, gaming takes up a bit of time as well. Assassin's Creed is one of the best games I've ever played. Ever. Totally amazing gameplay and equally well written story. On the PS3, with a Sony 32" Bravia to boot...at 1080p it's just brilliant :D

And then there's GTA4. Nico Bellic. My Man. Slick, cool. Compared to the last GTA I played...this is just insanely cooler. I don't like the graphics much though, I'm sure Rockstar could have done better (I'm biased after Assassin's Creed), but so far, I'm hooked. With things like 24 hrs functioning train networks...ability to hail cabs...go bowling or play darts, go out on a date...just amazing how they've worked to make the game as close to reality as possible. And yeah, Liberty City and the powerboats just kick rear as well.

Haven't had enough time to try out Half-Life 2 though ;) The Orange Box is waiting in the wings...

Well, back in 1994, when I got my first ever Creative Multimedia set..it was a big deal. Having a 2x CDROM Drive was an even bigger deal. Along with that pack, came a set of nice games (didn't realise they were nice until quite a few years later). One of the CDs was a combo pack of Syndicate, an awesome strategy + rule the world sort of game based in the future, Strike Commander, about which I've written before, Wing Commander II : Vengeance of the Kilrathi which was a space based game and finally a Diablo style game called Ultima III.

Cutting a long story short, I actually managed to finish WC2 & Strike Commander (somewhere in 1997-98-99) and Syndicate in May 2000 (I know because I've actually written this down in the game manual. I have got to be nuts.).

The other day, on #gentoo-dev (freenode), someone brought up Syndicate. I think it was robbat2 and a couple of us joined in....and well..ferringb pointed me to dosbox. And the rest as they say is history.

I dug out my 12 year old Creative CD, copied stuff off it and am now playing Syndicate (sadly Strike Commander won't work for some silly reason) and have plans to play WC2 again. Finally I can play Transport Tycoon without having to reboot. Finally I got my hands on Fire and Ice for which I've roamed the Internet since 1998 (and then forgot about it till today), after I lost my only working copy.

In this age of Doom 3 and Half-Life 2....I'm quite content playing good old DOS games. It makes for a nice change. Amazing to see the amount of work that went into these games as far back as 1991 (Origin brought out WC2 in 1991) and SC as well as Syndicate were 1993 releases.

fugney, I know you're not the violent types, but you should take a look at Syndicate. And surely Transport Tycoon (I guess you would have, already).

Off to play now, and then catch up on Germany Vs Italy.