My Year in Gaming 2
Prince of Persia
The bar was set high early on by Ubisoft, as this trailer is (if you ignore the annoying branding at the beginning and the end) essentially perfect:
I want to love Prince of Persia. Truly. And it's a very good game totally worth your money. Now let me begin bitching about it.
They've clearly intended a more cinematic experience for this game--the art is beautifully storybook, the environment is gorgeously rendered, and the camera swoops in during climactic moments like the best crane-mounted action cinematography. You get no item upgrades, no weapon upgrades, and the combat is pretty easy, but then, it isn't the point of the game. The point of the game is the story that propels you through the world Ubi's created and the running/jumping/climbing on said world. They want you to experience this like an interactive fantasy movie, not a game, so I must judge it in kind.
So here's the problem: the lead actor sucks, as does the script.
Bad voice acting and bad dialogue are nothing new in video games, sure, and the acting and writing aren't that bad, by video game standards. But if we're to view this (as I believe they intend) outside of video game standards, it's considerably worse. The Prince sounds like Bill S. Preston, Esq., and they've written the script to support that. I just can't understand why. The female sidekick-slash-"do-over"-mechanic is perfectly fine, and talks with the kind of overly-formal and somber intonations we've all come to expect from high fantasy epics (as does everyone else). So why undermine all of that with the lead?
He's supposed to be a scoundrel and ne'er-do-well, sure, but there are ways of doing that that are awesome, and ways of doing that that suck. I'm harping on this so much because, much like the combat in Mirror's Edge, it's the one grievous element keeping the game from being as amazing as it could and should be.
World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King
I have played and enjoyed the other releases of WoW, but probably wouldn't have if I didn't have a bunch of friends also playing. This is the first release that I can honestly say I would enjoy even if I was just playing solo. The world is richer, the story is more ingrained in everything you do, even the image textures are lightyears beyond the original World of Warcraft.
Some of the quests are truly inspired, and Blizzard's use of "phasing" (which is essentially an instance-without-an-instance, changing [your perception] of the world at large as you progress) is exactly what should've been happening from the beginning (if they had the technological ability, which I don't think they did). There are still plenty of problems associated with MMOs ("Bring me 12 goose livers! Now bring me 10 penguin skins!"), but those won't really be going away any time soon. At least, not until LOVE comes out.