Reprocessed, by Matt Patterson

Something approaching a weblog

Prince of Persia, Big Brother, Solaris

I've just finished playing Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. I bought it six months ago, and it's lain around waiting for me to finish other games. I remember the warm reception it received in Edge on its release two-odd years ago, and I remember the subsequent laments about its poor sales, and the frequent references to its fluidity in reviews of similar games (in which the comparisons were usually in favour of POP).

This is the first time in a long time for me that a game has entirely lived up to its hype. (Halo, maybe, was the last) The visuals were beautiful, the exteriors sun-drenched, with a vivid and bright palette - bright hangings rippling in the wind, areas of light and shade; endless skies, sometimes at sunset, with the sun soaking the clouds gold and pink. The interiors, too, were beautiful: the collapsing castle, vast and imposing, often lit by windows whose shafts of sunlight were made visible through patterns on the floor and dust hanging in the air. And the Prince himself, running, leaping, climbing and fighting his way through the castle was a delight.

I didn't find the puzzly bits particularly difficult. Once you've learnt the basic rhythms of the game -- for example, how to chain jumps together, how to change direction while swinging without stopping, or how to run up a wall and leap off to reach somewhere innaccessible -- then you can begin to gain fluency in the game and the vast locations start to become playgrounds and the Prince's range of movements become a filter which sharpens the way you see the environment: 'I can jump to there, and shimmy along that, which means I could leap onto that switch there, which is bound to do something...'. Movement in the game can become a conversation in which you ask questions of the environment by trying things. Thanks to the Dagger of Time there are few initially fatal decisions you can make -- you can simply rewind time and try something else. There's a real thrill in working your way through a particularly tricky section a bit at a time, rewinding or retrying until you suddenly string the whole sequence together into a single fluid and acrobatic motion which might see you scale the equivalent of a ten-storey building.

On top of that there was a story, which was well-conceived, well-told, and (most importantly) well-integrated. And there's a very enjoyable and (as with everything else) fluid combat system, which sees you swing your sword like a character from a martial-arts movie, dealing with multiple enemies with flourish and grace, stabbing, blocking, vaulting, and dodging.

Hunt it out before it becomes hard to get...

Big Brother

So, I'm not a fan of Big Brother, and I've tried hard to avoid it. However, Clare is watching this year, and I have watched it recently. It's awful, as you might expect, but there was a moment of utter televisual genius recently. All the contestants were made to get inside large cardboard boxes and stay there, with the person staying the longest winning something. The boxes had photos of their occupants on the outside of them and we were treated to footage of long conversations, with cutting and panning between the boxes as the conversation progressed. This was odd enough, but then, during long pauses in the conversation, the camera panned between the boxes suggesting pregnant pauses, meaningful glances, and dirty looks. Bizarre and compelling.

Solaris

I recently re-read Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, which is a magnificent book. I got the urge to watch one of the films of the book (I'd seen half the Tarkovsky version, but the second DVD wouldn't play, so we didn't get any further...) and the Steven Soderbergh version was the only one I could find in the local film hire place. His version is very different to Tarkovsky's and seems to pick up on the themes of guilt, loss and love particuarly. I don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't read the book or seen either one of the films, so I'll stick to impressions.

The cast were great, delivering very strong and assured performances that never slipped into over-emoting. The direction was wonderful. Very lean, very sparse, and very effective. The restraint and pace set the tone for everything, from the production design (A very convincing vision of the future, not ostentatious, vast amounts of detail dealt with and then left in the background), to the use of colour (the shift in colour between the station and earth was a really good articulation of the shift from here-and-now to flashback).

It was a beautiful film, which often felt like a european arthouse movie much more than a hollywood sci-fi blockbuster: The focus on character, the ambiguity in the telling, the great dialogue, and the way the performances were delivered were all very odd in a mainstream sci-fi film, and they made Solaris a film to savour.

The part of Kelvin is a difficult one (just read or watch to see what I mean...) and George Clooney is very very good. Just in case you were worried.

Not forgetting:

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