Mirror's Edge [preview]

The First "first person" game ever?

So I finally fired up my Mirror's Edge preview that I have been meaning to get around to for about a week now. My only regret is that I did not get around to it sooner. I am currently playing Spider-Man: Web of Shadows, Little Big Planet, Call of Duty: World at War, and what I have most recently reviewed Ratchet and Clank Future: Quest for Booty. The latter is probably not going to be played as much as the three former.

I haven't been the most adamant about keeping up with which company is coming out with what and what games are coming out when. I know what to keep an eye out for, but I haven't been on top of my game, so to speak, in terms of keeping up with EVERYTHING about video games like I used to be. And the reason for that is, well, real life and the fact that I have a huge opportunity coming my way soon that I have to get ready for (more on that in future postings). And I currently work, so that is taking up a good amount of my time.


Back to Mirror's Edge. I remember the first time I heard of this game, I picked up a copy of EGM and it was the cover story. As I was reading I was thinking, "If they can pull this off, this would be not only incredible and amazing, but genre changing (or creating for that matter)!" As I walked into one of my local GameStops I had mentioned to one of the salesmen that I was worried that this game was going to let me down. That it was going to somehow be much lower than my expectations, and that worried me. Not only as a gamer, but as a lover of creativity and the ability to pull ideas out of your head and make them work to the best of their abilities.

As I was playing the demo of ME I noticed something, this game is incredible. It is honestly unlike any game I have ever played in my entire life. The feel of it, the sense of oneness with the character. For the first time I actually felt like I was the character, rather than feeling like I was playing a characters story that usually I can't relate with. Whether it be a super hero like Spider-man or a cartoon character figure like Crash Bandicoot; Snake from Metal Gear Solid, or even Mario, I never related to those characters, I just enjoyed the fact that I got to play as them and some, through their amazing story. The Cloud Strifes and Aeris' will always have a place in my video game heart, but never once did I actually feel as if I was the character in question. Mirrors Edge has done that to me and I have only played the demo!!!!

So far it is EXCEEDING my expectations, which, by video game standards, is pretty dog on rare. Becasue although the hype leading up to awesome games are warranted, sometimes after you get done playing them you think, "That was great, but not great enough for me to have salivating over its release for the past year." This isn't to say that those games are bad, or to say that there arent other games that exceed gamers' expectations, it's just simply that Mirrors Edge is going to be one of those games, I hope, that I can look back on and say, "In a time where I thought I'd seen it all, and I was wondering if we had hit a ceiling in the creative process of video games, they come out with something so personal and extraordinary as this."

I can't promise that this is going to be one of the top 10 games of all time, or that this will even fall under the category of my own top 10, but if the controls, gameplay, and sheer fluidity of, what I consider to be the first real "first person" game can hold up to what I just experienced in the demo, then this could change the way the "first person" genre is defined.

Jeremy aka Adridius