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]

Oh, it's simple, is it ;) Let's see... I'd need a level map, a video of the level being played, a way to move the video on the screen as the prince moved between them, and a way to keep the screens in the state they were last visited until they were re-entered (so it's not just moving a video frame around a map). I do actually have access to Flash across on the Mac, though I've never really opened it - perhaps I could, given some time.

What's wrong with just moving a video frame around a map? Sure, it's not perfect, but it's never going to look perfect anyway just because you never really see him cross the screen threshhold... it's the principle! But, if you really want it to 'save state'- why not just cut the video into the various screens (which would probably make your job easier anyway) and then leave the previous video in place when it finishes running :)

the shakiness on the console conversions isn't innate to the limited hardware, it's just that the original one was made by somebody who actually cared about what he was doing!

Amen!!