I am finishing up The Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones for the Xbox… I am something like 90% or better through the game. Of the games of its kind (puzzler-platformer-sword fighter) it is probably the cream of the crop. I love these kind of games and this is probably my favorite (although I need to go back and play Prince of Persia: Sands of Time again). I have enjoyed all of the Prince of Persia games since the very first one (in DOS) — well, I never played Prince of Persia 3D, but, nobody else did, either. Price of Persia: The Warrior Within got some negative press, but, I enjoyed it a lot. The thing I both liked and disliked about The Warrior Within was that you replayed many parts of the game several times, primarily in different “times” (past and future) — it was a somewhat less linear game. I always felt like I knew where to go next in The Two Thrones. If you were stuck you could (pretty much) just look around and determine what needed to be done next. This isn’t to say the puzzles were easy, the game IS quite challenging in many parts, but, if you can learn the controls the game is lots of fun and quite rewarding. My only two complains are somewhat small… (1) The save points are really inconsistently spaced. Sometimes they are practically right on top of each other and at other times the save points are quite distance. Some of the most challenging parts of the game have save points they are really far apart so if you die repeatedly (in the hard parts) you have to play them over and over (even if you get past the hard part and then die) – doh! (2) The game has boss battles and I hate boss battles. These strategy of completing boss battles generally has nothing to do with the strategy of playing the game in general. As far as I can tell they are just thrown in to weed out the lesser players or push the plot? I have no idea. I can generally ride smoothly through games until I hit boss battles then I just end up getting frustrated and hoping there is a invincibility-cheat (which there is NOT in this game). Oh well, after tons of tries and reading strategy guides I can get by them, but, for me, they subtract from the fun of the game. I am sure there are lots of people who completely disagree with me about boss battles.
Not much else is going on… I am listening to the Narnia Chronicles books in unabridged audiobook format. I am almost finished with Prince Caspian and am really enjoying them. I am also listening to Wicked, which is pretty interesting.