Stumbling through Prince of Persia on Almost Everything

[davidn]

It's the 25th anniversary of the release of Prince of Persia! Which is a fact I hadn't actually realized until this afternoon - I’d had this video in the works for a month or so and it was just an amazing coincidence that it was ready to go up today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qrxk_VaSm6E&hd=1

Since I was about seven years old I've been a massive fan of Jordan Mechner's Prince of Persia. It's an excellent, carefully-made game which invented the "cinematic platformer" sub-genre, and was notable for featuring a character who actually looked and moved like a human being - a mundane thing in a game today, and so it's difficult to express just how outstanding this was at the time.

As it was released as the 8-bit era was ending and the 16-bit one was beginning, it was feverishly ported to just about every console in existence by very disparate teams, and this video examines the success or otherwise of each interpretation of the game.

Sit back and explore with me... this is a good one!

Comments

[premchaia_pre4]

Hmmmm. I do think that would have gone better with somewhat more rhythm and tonal variation to the speaking, rather than a constant fast patter. It's harder to avoid attention exhaustion when most of the sentences flow into each other near-breathlessly, each one as demibold as the last…

[xaq.livejournal.com]

That was quite a learning experience, especially for someone like me who has, somehow, never played any version of this game.

Personally, I'm surprised an ASCII version of this game was never made. (Unless the ZZT community has proved me wrong.)

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

I'm sure there's an RPG Maker version of the game at this point.

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

So much work has gone into this video (not least, tracking down all the different emulators needed to play all these versions and getting them all to run)! What an awesome tribute!

Out of curiosity, I'd be interested to know your thoughts on the version they included as an Easter-egg in PoP: Sands of Time, and how that one matches up to the other version. But that would mean you'd have to play Sands of Time. (In fairness, Sands wasn't too bad; it was the sequels that suffered more from the early-2000s grim-edgy-tryhard-warrior-antiheroes issue. But you've done a lot here already, so don't feel obliged. :P)

D.F.

[davidn]

The Sands of Time is an excellent game, and I feel bad about not realizing this for so long because of its sequel Warrior Within, which really did turn up the cynical moodiness and Godsmack up to stupid levels in an attempt to be dark. But Sands of Time is a really nice... sort of on-rails platform acrobatics experience, and the thing that really shines in it is the interaction between the Prince and Farah. Far from being an escort mission, she intelligently responds to the Prince and they have some great banter and liveliness - including the Prince muttering about the value of her "help" the next time he's alone if she's shot you in the back with arrows by mistake.

It's been a while since I played it, but as far as I can remember, the Sands of Time easter egg version is a straight port of the Macintosh one - not unplayable like most of the console versions, but just tuned a bit too slowly. It's not to be confused with the Flash version that Ubi Soft put out at the same time as the games, which also used the Macintosh graphics but was made with no real care.

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

Hah, I'm just watching a playthrough of Warrior Within on YouTube now, and it's hilaribad. :P The monsters are allegedly female and run around with voiceclips shrieking about how good the pain feels when the Prince hits them, and the thing that's hunting him down in order to restore the timeline (or whatever) takes damage from water - apparently the entire universe's temporal structure is guarded by the Wicked Witch of the West. My absolute favourite bit, though, is when the Prince walks into a swirling vortex and goes "What kind of magic is this?". Lemme see, you're on the Island of Time, looking for the Empress of Time, who's going to make the Sands of Time... could it be... umm... I know, Fire Magic! No, wait... Time! Time Magic! That's what I was thinking of! Perhaps time-travel drains IQ?

I agree completely with you on the Prince/Farah banter, though - it's so much more characterful and interesting than the usual "Go through the door! Pull the lever! Hey, not over there!" stuff that usually makes up videogame dialogue, and it really makes them shine as characters with personalities, making their relationship somewhere between resentment and attraction. It's *fun*, which is an important part of games, but one which seems to get overlooked a lot.

D.F.