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It got me thinking about how much I love the PoP series. Even from it’s old Rotoscoping days I’ve loved it. I remember playing it for the first time over at a friends house on their commodore amiga and being blown away. The rotoscoping of the Prince made his movements look so realistic, also his movements where very human, when he ran fast you needed to allow a certain amount of space to stop him before he fell off a ledge. This game also had something no previous game I’d played had. It had gore. I mean the gore might of only been a few red pixels on the screen, and definitely tame by todays standards, but it was so real. When you ran through a patch of spikes or a set of guillotine jaws suddenly your character fell to the ground and his white uniform was now covered in red. Sadly I never completed the original. I had a brief period of re-interest in it when I was in college as it would run on the PC’s there. The funny thing about it also was that the audio would transmit over the PC’s built in warning speaker (it is normally used to warn you of system errors with successive beeps) so you could always tell in lab who was playing the original PoP by the amount of noise their PC would be making.

Aside from that I left the series alone for a good while, but in 2006, having a void of no games to play I decided to give the new trilogy of PoP games a shot. I was blown away. Played back to back the new PoP series is some of the finest gaming you’ll ever experience. The gameplay is balanced, the controls are intuitive, the story is interesting and the combat does not get repetitive. The artistic styling of the game world is also simply stunning. However there has been much debate about which game in the trilogy is the best.

The first one, The Sands of Time, was the original so it has the nostalgic advantage of being the first to introduce us to the gameplay, environments and combat. The second, Warrior Within, went a lot grittier and darker, replacing the explosion of sand when you dispatch a baddie with actual blood. The soundtrack also went very grungy and the Prince himself started to look very Emo and somehow had had the time since the first game to get tatoos all over his right arm (if you watch the “making of” doc included with the game you’ll see his tatoos are identical to the ones on the lead designers arm) A lot of people didn’t like this change, personally, I’m glad the art department had the guts to break mold and try something new. I felt the combat was greatly improved with Warrior within, my only gripe was the levels. Instead of the linear approach of the first they went for an approach similar to the original whereby the levels crisscrossed each other. It made for a better maze system and better puzzling solving, but at times I would leave the game and then come back to it and have forgotten which of the numerous paths I had to take.

The third, The Two Thrones, really sealed the deal for me. It went back to the ethereal stylings of the first but kept the combat systems of the second. It also went back to being linear, much to my delight, like the first. I think if the 2nd hadn’t changed the artstyle as much as it did the 3rd would not of seemed so great. The contrast between the 2nd and 3rd really made it shine and a pleasure to play. The ending was also perfect, it answered the questions in the storyline and brought the series full circle to explain aspects of the first. All in all though the trilogy should not really be viewed as 3 separate parts but rather as a whole, and as a whole the series is excellent and complete.

Which is mainly why, when I heard they where making another PoP game, the feeling was bittersweet. I wanted to play more of the Prince of Persia but the completeness of the previous 3 meant that this would now be broken. The more I’ve known about and seen the art direction of the new game the more I’ve liked it. The dialog seems a little cheesy, obviously to pander to the younger or casual market, but the gameplay innovations and immersive environments will probably save it for me.

We’ll have to wait and see though. Watch this space for a review of the new installment once it gets released.

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It is also commonly held that the only people who actually play games are children and teenagers, therefore (much like the same stereotype that gets applied to you if you like anime) if you are an adult playing video games you are obviously being immature and should grow up and watch some TV.

Both the stereotypical image and age group of gamers is wrong. Most people might be surprised to know that the core market of gamers is between 18 and 35 years old. I put this down to the fact that most people exposed to games for the first time where born in the 70′s or 80′s when it started to explode and become popular in the mainstream. These people have grown up with games and are now in their adulthood and see no reason to give it up.

I also put this stereotype down to a generation thing. My grandparents saw no benefit to TV, they viewed it as a waste of time and money. Now, with the generation that has grown up with TV it is odd to enter someones house and not see a TV in the corner. The current upcoming generation is growing up in a world where the saturation of gaming is widespread. Whether it be the casual gamer who has their Nintendo DS or their mobile phone games or the serious gamer with their “Next Gen” consoles and their custom built PC’s. They will put a gaming unit alongside their TV like it is mandatory and think nothing of it.

I couldn’t imagine my life without games. I have little interest in passive media like radio and TV, I’d rather read my news online and contribute via discussion forums or get together with some friends and play some versus/co-op games rather than watch TV and let it dictate how the story unfolds.

Gaming to me though is not only a great way to get together with friends either in the flesh or online, but there is such a variety of games that I can use it to relax in the evening, blow off steam after a hard day in work, play an active part in the unfolding of a story or feel that sense of achievement from completing something, much like the feeling you get from finishing a jigsaw puzzle or crossword. There is also a sense of confidence you get when you play a game and see yourself getting noticeably better over time as you master the intricacies of the games control.

So from now on I guess I will also be blogging about games I’m playing and my thoughts and opinions of them. I hope if you are reading this and do tend to stereotype gamers that you will maybe rethink your opinions because, whether you like or not, gamers are here to stay and I’m proud to be one of them.

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With a capital “A”. Seriously, since Web 2.0 started to really roll out and more and more sites started to adopt its philosophy I’ve noticed a complete paradigm shift in what the Internet means to me. I literally love the internet now whereas maybe 2 years ago I was becoming increasingly disillusioned as to its real world merits. It was becoming like TV, I was merely flicking through my favorite sites on a daily basis, reading my usual RSS feeds and then switching it off.

However things started to change a while back when a friend pointed me in the direction of this new toolbar called “Stumbleupon”. My whole life I have hated additional toolbars in browsers, all to often I’ve had to clean out a friends PC only to see the myriad of toolbars they have installed that are there due to a virus or are slowing down their computer because they are bloated and poorly coded. So when I was told about this “must have” toolbar, I took the advice with a pinch of salt.

I did my research and found nothing but praise for it, so I signed up and installed it. What got me first was its pure simplicity. You select your favorite topics then merely click the “Stumble” button and you’ll be given a page related to your interests that hundreds of people around the world have voted as being relevant. You can then give the page a thumbs up or down depending on how interesting you found the page.

This in itself was a “Wow!” moment for me. Sure it was superseded by the likes of Digg, Reddit or any of the other link sites, but in my opinion Stumbleupon is the first Web 2.0 app that has truly captured the essence of social networking. It was the first time that I felt I was interacting with the Internet in a “human” fashion. When I meet up with my friends, I do not have to always ask “What movies have you seen recently that are good”, a lot of the time they will nominate this information without me having to ask, and the more you think about it the more you realize this is how humanity progresses in reality. Search engines like Google or Yahoo assume the user already knows the question when they visit their site, humans don’t, humans wish to pass on information regardless of whether the individual they are passing it to has requested it.

This paradigm shift in internet browsing has changed everything for me. When I open my browser I know the internet is about to start a conversation with me on topics i’m interested in and maybe some it knows I should be interested in. When I click the stumble button hundreds of people start saying “Oh you have to see this site, it’s amazing”. Also, stumbleupon allows me to search all of its recommendations for ones that contain specific information to my inquiry. Now instead of having to rely on an internet robot to tell me which site is most relevant to my search I can find pages that I know actual humans have looked at, read and said “Yeah, this site would be perfect for you”. On a daily basis now I feel I am absorbing 10 times the amount of information I was previously, so much so that when I’m not reading about new world developments or checking out the latest memes my brain starts to feel “itchy” like it needs to be scratched with some new information. The brain is a muscle like any other and I liken this feeling to one a long distance runner must feel if they are made to sit still for long periods of time. We are at a point now where not only is the information of the world at our fingertips but we have the tools to consume, produce and share it. Previous to our generation, no humans in history had the ability of tapping into this amount of human thinking, knowledge and wisdom.

Below I have linked a great talk by Clay Shirky at the Web 2.0 Expo this year in regards to what he calls “Cognitive Surplus”. His thoughts on it and its implications for the future of the internet and mankinds interaction with it are exciting to say the least. Cognitive Surplus is the thinking time we have that is not utilized by any organized means. For most of us 8 hours of cognisance is used for work every day but the rest is “surplus”. Previous to our generation this surplus was wasted on the consumer mediums of TV, radio, literature… etc. But now with the advent of social networking humans can use this surplus to create and share as well as consume information. What this utilizing of human cognisance will yield is yet to be seen, but if the internet at present is anything to go by, it looks like exciting times ahead.

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I guess that’s how I feel about this blog. I’ve mused over the idea of a blog to call my own for years. In my mind it would amazing, it would be inspiring and helpful and fun. It would be everything I wanted that blank page to be when I was a child. An outlet for my thoughts, aspirations and dreams. Knowing that this will never live up to that expectation I told myself “Why bother!” and I’ve let years of my life and experience disappear without record.

Well not anymore. As yet I don’t have a “niche” that I want this blog to fit into, I don’t even have a guideline on what I’ll be writing about. I tend to switch rapidly between my interests so it would bore me to write a blog about specific topics. Mainly I’m interested in computers, net culture and thinking about and questioning all aspects of life in this generation

Whatever the future brings for this site I hope if you are reading this you will stick around to see it grow. If you think there is some killer widget/theme I need to add to this site, or if there is something you think I should be blogging about then sign up to the forums and let me know or leave me a comment here.

In the end I decided that I’d rather have a bad blog full of memories than no blog and a void where sparks of genius/insanity and where debates/arguments never took place.

Confucius “The weakest ink lasts longer than the best memory.”