I haven't seen many things that really wowed me this year at E3. Oblivion floored me, FEAR had me giddy, Quake Wars looks to be an excellent multiplayer game although I've only seen a trailer, and Rise of Legends is going to be one kick ass strategy game when it comes out. We've been trying to put together a top five list, and we've always been short on the fifth part. I think I found it. Prince of Persia is going to be one bad ass mother if they pull it off.

Let me show you my new sword!

Hold still!

I played the original on my PC and didn't like it, I was very frustrated. Then I picked it up on Xbox and loved it. I played it through a few times. Naturally, I wanted Warrior Within, and I purchased that, played it, but never really got into it. I was pretty disappointed to be sure. Of course, that killed my enthusiasm for the third game in the series.

And yet, by the end of the demo I just witnessed, I was full of glee and excitement.

Prince of Persia: Kindred Blades (this isn't an official name, it's just the name I saw on some Ubisoft literature) is yet another reinvention of the genre/series/whatever. They're going to combine the uniqueness that made the first game so lovely, the puzzles I would assume, with the combat that made the second game so interesting along with some new elements to tie the series up and make a whole new game.

In this one, you get to play two characters, the Prince we all know and love, and the Dark Prince, which is every evil aspect of the Prince rolled into some sick, sadistic son of a bitch. The Prince uses his classic swords, and the Dark Prince, he uses a chain with blades on it. If the Prince walks through fire, he'll turn into the Dark Prince, and if the Dark Prince finds water, he'll revert back to his nicer, more social counterpart. The much feared Sands of Time have finally scarred our dark hero, to make him much darker. The story work in this series is just fantastic; I wait with my story-loving mega hard-on for this continuation.

In this next installment, you come back to Babylon only to find out that some dark army has taken over your hometown, and that shit just ain't cool. They want you dead, and they're hunting you, so you need to haul ass across town. In Kindred Blades, you have to keep moving or less the enemy will catch up with you and kill you. Fortunately, combat isn't going to hold you back because of the speed kill system they've implemented.

While there will still be freeform fighting, as there has been in the older titles in the series, there will also be this speed kill and assassination fighting. If you come across an enemy before they realize that you are there, you can do a stylized speed kill, like jumping off of a building, stabbing one dude in the back, twisting around and slashing another one's head clean off. There are a lot of decapitations, and everyone likes a good decapitation. All of these look beautiful, fluid and natural, like all of the movement and animation in the series.

I was also treated to a scene in which the Prince and Dark Prince were moving freely through Babylon, from rooftop to rooftop, killing bad guy after bad guy in awesome fashion after awesome fashion. As you can remember from the first game, you never had to load ever. The entire game was just sort of there and accessible at any time, you just had to move through it. It looks like they're going to do the same, but with the city of Babylon. You'll need to keep moving because you're being hunted by this big army, but you've got a lot of ground to cover, and a lot of ways to cover it.

Up to and including stealing one of your enemies' chariots and racing down the narrow streets on some sort of a crazy joyride, an inch away from death at any time. I got to see this, other chariots pulling along side and having to be driven into things, soldiers running out of dark corners to try and jump onto your speeding cart, needing to be stabbed off. Of course, there's not a lot of repetition here either, you'll wind up dealing with these fast approaching enemies in different ways. It was described as sort of an interactive movie, and while I don't know the level of control needed as I wasn't holding the control sticks, I can say that it looked beautiful to watch. As a man grabbed on to the back of the cart, only to be stabbed quickly in the forehead by the Prince with a dagger, and then to watch him drop off and hit the quickly passing sand, I felt a smile come across my face.

I also got treated to the look of one of the new bosses - a gigantic, Sands of Time-infected gladiator with no bottom jaw. He sharpened his huge axe ominously and turned to our hero for the big battle.

Basically, it looks like they're going to continue to build upon an already epic series, and add some new more elements. After seeing that game, I already want to replay the series, and finish the second game this time around. In a convention with real surprises few and far between, I am just plain giddy waiting for Prince of Persia: Kindred Blades.

-- Jackson "Smapdey" Johns