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

[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!

[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.