davidn | Struggling through Prince of Persia

This one's been a while in the making, largely because my plan for it turned out to be a little ambitious. For this video, I was determined to complete the NES version of Prince of Persia, as it's been one of my favourite games ever since I first played it in the mid-90s - on the DOS version, I can breeze through it in under twenty minutes.

Unfortunately, I was only to discover the NES version's comparative dreadfulness through playing it - it casts off the cut-scenes, responsiveness of the controls, and many key parts of the game, making me think that it must have been made by people who were a bit pressed for time. But I persisted - and the resulting experience makes it one of the parts of this experiment that, rather opposite from the jealousy of console-owning friends I had at that age, made me very glad that I grew up with the PC instead.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zaxWD0BVSs

This is a fairly huge video, and it's been edited down from its original running time of upwards of one hour - I imagine that it's only interesting to watch the whole way through if you're familiar with the PC version of the game and can appreciate the differences as I get caught out by them. You get about seven minutes of unbroken gameplay, and then I start being a bit more liberal with my time-altering superpowers. It features:

Twelve excruciating levels
Four thousand retakes
Three thousand and ninety-nine instances of me saying "Right!" overconfidently after a retake
Even more bizarre exasperated noises (coming soon as a Best Of collection)
Nearly melting the bleep machine
The same eight bars of music repeated for all eternity (cut out during editing in this video - you're welcome)
Skeletons where they shouldn't be
Lack of other objects where there should be

Good luck. If you decide to stick with it through the whole 45 minutes, you'll need it.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

ravenworks.livejournal.com

Holy mackerel, I have to split this into THREE comments. :) How to tell when you've wound up making an exceptionally long video to comment on. ;)

Did you find the height (or duration) of his upwards jump to be a bit odd and short? I don't remember much about this game, but I do remember hopping around trying to haul my way up, or shake loose a ceiling tile above me, so that animation stuck in my brain...

What kinds of things were wrong with the other console PoPs you tried?

According to an FAQ I found, there IS no way to tell which ones are poisonous! The bastards. :)

Okay, I'm glad I'm not the only person who gets so edgy on a game like this :P

"The sight was so horrifying that I went around clutching my stomach for the rest of the day" - did you really?

Man, the drops in this game really are shockingly high... I think I've played games where you can die by falling before, but something about his falling just has such... weight behind it...

I can't believe they put cliffs that close past the start of a screen when there's such a jarring pause before you suddenly have to tap the jump button immediately! I understand it's a cruel game, but working a challenge around the load times seems a little fourth-wall...

So what normally happens to the skeleton, if you're surprised you can kill him?

In terms of things that have changed - do you know if they're at least consistent among console versions (like the consoles got the "official 1.1" versions of the maps maybe) or if each team just went "hmmm, I think THIS would be cool!" of their own volition...

"You're lucky I've changed the music... assuming I have, because I don't know yet, because I'm still here talking to you!" I am 27, my brain should not still hurt this much over the time paradoxes of recorded media...

It's just occurred to me what an ACTUAL "stumbling through" of this game would be like... can you imagine? I had my older brother to explain to me how everything worked, so I really can't imagine making any headway in this bizarre game with its myriad of contextual controls... What was it like for you?

What was the music in the moment of confusion :D

Oh man, having the dude steal the drink from you is awesome :D You said this part wasn't obligatory in the original - would his health actually be one piece shorter when you eventually fight him if you skipped it?

I just noticed the background-flashes are color-coded to show who got hit... good idea! I wanted to say "how did they differentiate in the original", but then I realised, I guess most people weren't on monochrome macs at the time. X3

"I've never tortured the people who play MY games like this, have I?" I am dying to hear responses from the people who've gotten through the area that has an achievement for dying less than ten times at it. :)

So, wait, why did the shadow even appear on screen there if he doesn't do anything in this version? Or is it possible to make that jump and have him react, but it also lets you through if you miss completely? :P

"WAAAAH! Err, that gap's a bit... wider."
Wow, he really DOES know this game!
"... I think."
Or he's a tremendous bluffer whose conscience got him in the end..

From:

kibet.livejournal.com

"Man, the drops in this game really are shockingly high... I think I've played games where you can die by falling before, but something about his falling just has such... weight behind it..."

Saboteur II (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saboteur_II:_Avenging_Angel) had ridiculously high drops and you had to watch it no matter how many screens there were. Typically you would be runnning along a tightrope and you had to keep running, if you stopped you would just fall. I don't think I knew the story until I read it at that link, although I remember the woman was the sister of the first saboteur. Nothing about Nuclear weapons, but when you could buy games for 2-3 quid you did not need to know the story.

From:

davidn

I just looked up a video - what struck me most about it was the massive tightrope across six screens, seemingly looping around for eternity until the scenery finally changed!

That, too, though, is a rare example of a game of the era with quite well-proportioned people, even though the focus isn't nearly so much on the animation.

From:

kibet.livejournal.com

Yep, with the tightrope and it is really far. Also your health does not increase when you are running. If you stop in the center, you don't it is again the same screen until you hit the bottom. I'm surprised that the person did not use the high kicks more or the ninja rolls (jumps that makes you thing you are progressing faster). Also the squat, we used to say that she was farting or pooping (it was the eighties although possibly early 90s as it was the C64 we were playing it on).

From:

davidn

Wow :) Well, I'm very glad that it was interesting enough to produce such commentary - let's see what I can do with this! (As it turns out, my response to the first post has exceeded the character limit on its own. This does not bode well.)

Control issues are the common thing between all of the console versions - either there will be something slightly unresponsive in the movement (which in this game is deadly), or jumps will be inconsistent, or the combat just won't work. In this game - with the difficult jumps and the potions - I wouldn't have known what the game was expecting me to do, without having played the PC version first so that I knew what the game expected me to do and not do. My post about the console versions is still here, and though it's seven years old now I still stand by most of it. In this version, as you mentioned the upward jump, I noticed that unless you held Up, he wouldn't complete it - see the door-opening difficulty at the start of level 1. Some of the frames of animation at the end seem to have been cut off.

Prince of Persia was a frightening game not just for the quite high bloodiness for the era (I really do still remember the awful feeling I had in my stomach after seeing the effect of the biting gates, the first time) but for how unpredictable it was - it got very weird starting at level 4, with the sudden cut to a room you thought you were going to breeze through on your way to the exit, only to be faced with a sudden new object and a PC speaker sting. It also has a lot of tension when you're really high up, knowing that when you slip you'll see him fall a very long way - particularly in the Sands of Time trilogy, I got a really uncomfortable tingling in the soles of my feet when I was navigating scaffolding millions of feet up in the taller rooms. The gravity in this felt a lot more floaty than the PC version, but even so, in a game that has such unusually humanlike movement, you tend to 'feel' the effects of gravity more.

I was actually impressed, when I was in my speedrunning era, of how few rooms (on the correct path) had drops right after a screen change, always giving you time to react, unless the path was such that you would have been in that room already. But I think it might be just because I'm so used to the game - and with the added split-second of loading between rooms... it's not nice, no.

There seems to be no consistency between the console versions at all - they all did their own thing, using the original game largely as a template. I haven't played very far in many of them, but I'm pretty sure the Master System had the skeleton fight intact. Speaking of which - in the original, the skeleton had no health bar on account of already being dead, and the only way to defeat him was by knocking him down a pit (which is why I was trying to retreat and turn him around when I fought him in this video). Here... they've just made him a slightly unhealthy-looking guard.

From:

ravenworks.livejournal.com

Wow, here's something creepy/awesome... apparently listening to you for 45 minutes straight was enough that now when I read your comments, I hear them in your voice...

I remember that skeleton pit thing, now that you mention it! Man, that was another cool touch. They really thought about this in terms of neat bullet points rather than efficient use of the gameplay elements that they had to program in.... a lesser game would have had those skeletons and floaty potions everywhere, but saving them for one-shot encounters like that really makes them that much more amazing when they do happen!

From:

davidn

I read things in their writers' voices all the time, although somehow that hasn't yet applied to people who I met first over the Internet, who I 'hear' in my head as close to my own voice even if I know what their voice sounds like. Perhaps it really is a matter of how long you've been exposed to the voice for...

And yes, that definitely enhanced the game's unpredictability as well - the way that it did something very different and unique on nearly every level (skeleton, mirror, potion-stealing, Fatty, floating, mouse rescue, upside-down potion) without re-using any of these events.

From:

davidn

The first time I played Prince of Persia, I spent the entire hour on the first level because I didn't know that there was a button other than the arrow keys, and therefore couldn't make careful steps, cling on to platforms or strike with the sword. And the game is built in quite a maze-like fashion - there are usually multiple routes through a level, or rooms or entire routes off to the sides that you don't need to visit (there's an entire other route with a second guard above the one I took in level 1, presuming that they haven't just removed it on the NES). I watched

rakarr play the Sands of Time version of the original game last night, with him only being slightly familiar with the game's layout, and I was... quite envious of his being able to experience the exploration of it for the first time.

I really wanted that health difference to come up at the end of the game when you fight him! And I was convinced that that would be the case - but apparently he didn't think of it. And on his next appearance - it's possible that the shadow/reflection does do what he does in the original (which is to step forward and close the door on you when you leap across the gap) if you make the jump - it's entirely possible that despite jumping at the edge of the platform, I just didn't make it (see complaints about the controls several times above).

That gap on level 7 has definitely been shifted over a bit - perhaps to ensure that you couldn't go through the wall at the edge of the screen, as I describe a bit later. But I don't know. As I also say in the video, it's difficult to remember, as the large differences make the small ones seem like you might just be misremembering them.

And finally, the music during the little interlude here is the theme music from Countdown, which you could probably think of as the British equivalent of the famous Jeopardy music.

Stay tuned for Part 2.