Prince of persia
After finishing Prince of Persia warrior within a few days ago I thought it would be fun to add the original game to the site. In the game you are wrongfully jailed by the grand vizir Jaffer (why are they always called that?) and you have to escape the dungeon which is shaped like a maze and has traps and guards all over the place.
In a surprising turn the game does not follow the standard “die an X amount of times before it’s game over” but instead you have a total of ONE hour of real time to complete the game. You can die an unlimited number of times but each time you do you are sent back to the start of the level and thereby you loose time.
The first level is made so you can learn the basics of movement and combat. There are switches that open doors for a short amount of time which you have to pass before they close. There are plenty of traps like loose tiles, knives that spring out of the ground and long drops. On the later levels you have to pass all of these traps in a minimum amount of time so you cannot make any mistakes.
The prince himself is extremely agile and can jump over long distances and grab onto ledges. He also has to do swordfights against the guards posted in the dungeon some of which can be quite difficult.
You only get three heart containers at first representing your health, fall too high or get hit by a guard and you loose one heart. You can fill these up with drinks and sometimes even increase you max health but these are usually hidden away on certain levels.
The animation of the prince at the time of it’s release were considered state of the art by using motion capturing to make movements very fluid. Even today they still look good. The backgrounds are a bit of a different story though because you are in a dungeon it’s mostly rock/stone walls and not much else. Luckily you won’t notice it too much when you’re trying to solve some of the puzzles in the game.
There is not too much difference between the versions but the newer ones on the SNES and Megadrive do look nicer overall. In these version the prince look more like he’s from Persia despite being a bit steriotypical with a turban and pointy shoes. In the earlier versions he wore something that resembled a white piyama and had blond hair. In the Sega Cd version the prince is given the Anime treatment and has purple hair and has those big anime eyes, but you only see this on some of the cutscenes.
Prince of Persia remains to this day a great game in my opinion and is very challenging. The timebased limit of the game adds an extra difficulty but it can be annoying when you are close to the end of the game with not enough time to complete it. This basically means you have to start the game from scratch. Some versions give you passwords so you can start on other levels but this does not mean you get the full hour again.
The game has been released for a whole number of systems and all of them are very much alike gameplay wise so choose whatever system you like best and try this game, it’ll be worth it.
Overal rating: 8.5/10
This game was released for many different systems here are some notes:
| Apple | Released in 1990. Game has been tested but not completed with the Basilisk II v0.8. This is the only version to have highres graphics. |
| Amiga | Released in 1990. Game has been tested but not completed with winUAE v0.9.91. Exactly like the DOS version graphics wise, it also supports soundblaster cards under DOS. |
| Amstrad CPC | Released in 1990 developed my Microids. Game has been tested but not completed with CPCE 1.40. This is the French version. |
| Atari ST | Released in 1990. Game has been tested but not completed with SainT v1.10. For some reason the game uses a whole lot of blue color and thus it looks a bit different from the others, not in a good way though. |
| DOS | Released in 1990. Game has been tested but not completed on a DOS and Win2000 PC. The first version I believe, with a blond haired piyama wearing prince :) |
| Megadrive/ Genesis |
Released in 1993 published by Domark. Game has been tested but not completed with WGens 2.11. Graphic wise the most detailed version. I could not get used to a second button for jumping though and it does not support the original way of simply pressing up to jump while running. |
| NES | Released in 1992 published by Vrigin. Game has been tested but not completed with FCE ultra 0.98.12. The only version to scroll the screen. The screen was unable to hold one entire field so when you walk to the edge it scrolls with you however this also makes it more difficult to see any traps and such. |
| Sega CD | Released in 1992 developed by Victor interactive industries. Game has been tested but not completed with WGens 2.11. There is a huge intro with anime characters and speech but the game remains the same as the others. It’s not the same as the Megadrive version though because it was developed by another company. Sega CD SRAM size to none if you have problems running it in Wgens. |
| SMS – Sega Master system |
Released in 1992 published by Domark. Game has been tested but not completed with Dega 1.12. The levels also did not fit on the screen but instead of scrolling they simply made the levels smaller which is even worse than scrolling. |
| SNES | Released in 1992. Game has been tested but not completed with ZSNES 1.36. This is the Japanese version of the game, as far as I know it was only released there too. This is the only version to have different maps, every level is bigger that it’s orginal and they are more difficult as well so try it if you like a challenge. |
| ZX Spectrum | Released in 1995 by Nicodim. Game has been tested and completed with emuZwin 2.5. This is the Russian version which was originally on disk only but was converted to tape. |
| Others | Gameboy released in 1992 released by Virgin. Gameboy Color released in 1999 released/developed by Red Orb Entertainment. PC-engine released in ?. There are probably still more systems the game was released on but I can’t list them all. |
| Date added | Nov-29-2004 21:33 |
| Name | Prince of persia |
| Developer | Broderbund |
| Publisher | Broderbund |
| First released | 1990 |
| Genre | Action |
