Arcade-style racing games are most commonly found on consoles, but the PC isn't completely without representation in the genre. There isn't any customization to be done to the cars, no tweaking the power-to-weight ratio or changing tyres, there's just a bunch of cars available with either automatic or manual transmission and a handful of tracks to race them at. At first the player only has access to three tracks, but another three are unlocked by winning in the Championship Mode. Eventually the mirror versions of the six tracks are unlocked as well. For over a 15-year old racing game Screamer is still surprisingly fun to play but it has definitely aged in all departments. The way the cars' drift feels rather weird and twitchy at times, even minor scrapes between vehicles can send one of the cars flying. The graphics sometimes clip so it can look your car is slightly inside a wall or another car. The sounds and music sometimes cut out. Worst of all, the game is prone to crash every now and then. It's not often enough to be deal-breaker, but when the game exits to desktop when you're five seconds away from winning a race it can be frustating. On the plus side, the game works fine with modern controllers and even supports analog devices like Xbox 360 gamepads, so acceleration, braking and controlling work with the same degree of accuracy as with modern racers. The game has a certain charm to it. From the enthusiastic announcer (which can be turned off) to just drifting your way through a corner, the game's just plain fun. There are some additional gameplay modes like Slalom where you're supposed to drive through gates in order to get more time to finish the race with, but they weren't that special and the game doesn't even track the best results in those. Even the Time Attack mode is a bit lackluster, I found it more enjoyable to just play normal races and aim for the fastest times on those. GOG's release of Screamer is my first time ever playing the game for me, so I don't have nostalgia goggles on. I still found it enjoyable and fun to play to the point of mastering the tracks. Here's hoping GOG will also bring Screamer 2 and Screamer Rally to its catalogue.
Sands of Time is a game that approaches greatness but some flaws prevent it from getting there. Two of the biggest issues are somewhat tied together so they need to be mentioned together as well: The fighting and the camera. The combat system is a rare case where fighting enemies either feels insultingly easy or anger-inducingly frustating, with barely any middle ground. And it never really feels fun. The enemies are dumb and single-minded and almost every one of them can be dispatched with one of two attacks, either doing the "Vault over, slash, stab"-combo, or the "launch from a wall, hit, stab"-attack. These two will be repeated ad nauseam since in most encounters more enemies will keep spawning so that there's always four guys attacking the player, until all of the predetermined amount of enemies in that location are destroyed. In most cases this is 15-20 enemies, but in two seperate occasions there's closer to 50 bad guys waiting for their predecessors to be killed. In this regard there's very little challenge to the fighting and it becomes boring quickly. But then the camera is factored in. Outside of normal gameplay the camera works fine but when fighting it becomes a hinderance. It can get stuck behind a pillar or show just the combatants' legs or even just shake around in an epileptic seizure when it's trying to decide which angle to go for. The player can control the camera but then it easily becomes a tug-of-war between the player and the invisible cameraman. There is also a fixed, alternative camera angle to use, which can be good or bad in a fighting situation as it's often far away from the action or possibly hiding an enemy behind a column. The camera problem is exasperated by how the prince controls in relation to the camera. If you push towards an enemy and jump in an effort to vault over him and in that moment the camera moves just enough, the game instead decides the push wasn't towards the enemy but to the side of him, making the prince do a roll along the ground instead. In a similar fashion, finishing off a downed enemy can easily be turned into a stab at another by the camera's wonkiness. In the two enemy-heavy encounters mentioned above the game can quickly become frustating when mistakes occur not because of the player's fault, but because the unhelpful camera and the controls tied to it make it hard to do an easy task. You also have to protect an NPC in these two encounters, which also adds to the frustation. It's difficult to even try for a tactical position or retreat in order to take the enemies down one by one, since they will simply teleport closer to the prince when they're a certain distance away. New enemies also teleport in out of thin air, often close enough to be an instant threat. A few minor technical problems also pop up. The characters' speech is very quiet at times, even though I had the speech setting at 100% and the rest at half that. This forced me to tweak my sound settings constantly and considering how much of the game's charm comes from the characters' back-and-forth, it is something of an issue. There are no subtitles either. There was one music track which sounded like it had electric guitars in it, which didn't really fit in to the theme of the game. All that said, outside the combat the game is great fun. The environments are lovely to look at and it's fun to initially see where you're supposed to go, think "How am I supposed to get over there?" and then figure out the path of climbing, swinging, wall-jumping and generally parkouring your way over, under and through the obstacles. The prince will occasionally run out of the room he just entered or run up a wall instead of across it because of the controls-tied-to-the-camera-angle thing, but since there are no enemies present it's mostly only worthy of a frown. The game is quite short, only taking around seven hours to complete on one's first playthrough when the puzzles are still a mystery. Had I purchased this at release at retail price I would've been disappointed, but GOG's price far better reflects the time investment required to finish the adventure. Sadly, this PC version lacks the original 1989 Prince of Persia game which the console versions all had as an unlockable bonus. Due to the issues explained I have no desire to replay the game again. If there was a version of the game that eschewed the combat in favour of more environments to explore and parkour in I would be all over it. In conclusion, while the flawed camera and combat systems keep the game from being as good as it might have been, it should still be played for the great platforming, cool environments and a nice story.
