Struggling through Prince of Persia

[davidn]

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.

Comments

[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.