Time dilation

At the moment, I'm playing through two of the best action games of the last decade.

The first one is the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Trilogy. And what can I say: It's still a great franchise. It doesn't surprise me that even supercritic Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame thinks it's one of the best games of all the time.

Well, I'm just through part 1 and started part 2. Back in the days many critized it for leaving the magical oriental setting for a more dark, heavy metal themed worl (including scantily clad women). Still, with the upgraded combat mechanics I for one find it's the overall better game.

But what actually made me write a post on it was the small ad on PoP:WW (excuse the quality, just had my phone handy to take the picture).

It reads "The most cult swordfights on DVD! Kill Bill". Not only is it peculiar because it's actually part of the print of WW's front cover, but because it made me think about a time related phenonemon, which kind of fits in with PoP's theme: the perception of time.

For me at least, the computer game timeline is somehow outside of the normal timeline, and it's actually moving "quicker" for me. WW came out in late 2004, while the theatrical releases of Kill Bill were autumn 2003 and spring 2004. Still, if you'd askes me before noticing that sticker, I'd have adamantly thought that Kill Bill was newer that WW, or even the whole Trilogy, which ended in 2005 with The Two Thrones (which I admittedly never finished, as I never defeated the final boss back when it came out... well, that's to come in the next few weeks).

So it seems to me that the video game time is passing faster. 2004 in Videogames just seems so much longer past than 2004 in the real world. But that might be due to the quick developement of new technologies and the fast pace of the medium.

The other game series I play kind of ties in with the last entry: the greek mythology action epic God of War. I have the first two parts lying around for quite some time as I liberated them from my brother some time ago, but despite the praise it gets everywhere, I never could bring myself to play it, even after finishing the quite blatant rip-off Conan on a friend's PS3.

Well, I'm about halfway into the first part, and as I lack both a HD telly and a PS3, I can't really finish the trilogy at the moment, but the God of War 3 release still came to me as the perfect reason to pop those old DVDs into my PS2. Funnily enough it looks quite similar two WW, which came out shortly before the first GoW, with only the focus more on combat than PoP's acrobatics.