It's getting crowded in Persia

Man, they are just churning out Prince of Persias (Princes of Persia?) these days. Kotaku's got a few new screenshots from the third installment of the reborn ninth-century adventure franchise--they look gorgeous, of course, and promise great things, as all screenshots do, but...well, what happened to delayed gratification? Wasn't there a new one of these just last November? And the November before that? I have an uncle like this--one day we turned around and he had three kids, all roughly the same age. Which makes Ubisoft's three-in-three-years accomplishment all the more staggering since, from what I understand, children don't have to undergo a substantial debugging process. Ubisoft's Splinter Cell and Rainbow Six properties are on the same blistering schedule: there have been three Splinter Cells in three years and at least one Rainbow Six on one platform or another since the series hit the current generation of consoles in 2003.

Times were, the only games to have a new edition every year were sports games, and even then, you'd just get some minor graphical touch-ups and a few updated rosters. But, of course, this is a new age, a utopian era in which developers gratefully work their tails off in exchange for commensurate pay and overtime compensation.