An important lesson learned and a game review
I did something really stupid. Not just once. Over the last couple of months, I did the same stupid thing over and over again. It finally caught up to me.

I played a PS2 game with only one saved game. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

The game: Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Don't do what I did. Have at least two or three saved games.

I don't know why I did it. Maybe it was because the coolest part of the game is that you, as the unnamed British-accented Prince of Persia, get this cool dagger that gives you the ability to go back in time to fix stupid mistakes, such as dying. Time travel! What's not to love?

Let me try to blame the game for a minute
Of course, that's limited time travel, usually no more than ten seconds. Who knew I'd walk into a room, kill a bunch of sand guys, be millimeters of blue status bar away from death myself, and not see any of the health-restoring water fountains around? Of course I saved the game; I was millimeters from death!

Yeah, bad mistake. In that level, those evil bastard game writers had made it impossible to complete the level if you didn't have enough health to jump off a pole onto a platform. Nowhere else in the game did I lose health for jumping off a pole onto a platform! Why did it have to be so important there?

I'll get back to the point now
The game is incredible. It's an adventure game that falls back to the old style of play, meaning you may only save the game at certain points. While this wasn't so popular with some gamers I know, I liked it. I spent more time playing the game than I did saving it, a bad habit I fall into every time I play Tomb Raider. (Jump, save, jump, save, jump, save... it gets tiring.)

While the game goes along the same lines as Tomb Raider, the focus is less on puzzles of the mind and more on puzzles of the body. Instead, you, as the Prince, have incredible acrobatic abilities. You can run up on walls, crossing large gaps without ever needing to jump. You can press a button on a wall by running up it. You can scale high places by jumping between two walls until you reach the top. It's amazing. For me, being a Tomb Raider addict, it required a whole new style of thought. No longer could I look at a room and think to myself, "Ok, can't go that way because the gap is too large." I had to turn my mind to say, "Ok, can't run across that wall because there's a statue in the middle of it."

That isn't to say that some of the puzzles weren't up to a Tomb Raider level. I was really impressed and challenged by a few of them. But mostly, I loved sailing through a room, running over a button and gliding across a wall to reach the next platform before the one under me collapsed. If I didn't make it? No problem! Just go back in time and try it again!

The thing I had the hardest time with was the fighting. I had a sword and the dagger of time. The Prince has a great move where he can jump over an opponent and slash them down from behind. But in order to destroy the sand creature completely (yeah, the bad guys are made of sand but strangely tough!) they had to be stabbed with the dagger, which took some time, especially with guys still hacking at you. These bad guys knew how to surround and corner you too, unlike the Tomb Raider games, where you can just move backwards and the bad guys will almost always stay in front of you. Plus, the Prince has this chick to protect too... if she dies, the game ends... unless your dagger of time is working!

I highly recommend this game. Gameplay is excellent, the acrobatics are phenomenal, graphics are good and the story and locale are very interesting.

Just have more than one saved game. I think I embarrassed and frustrated myself enough for everyone.