Prince of Persia

The Good
When you start up the game you’ll be amazed by the rich colours, especially if you grew up with earlier ports. Intensive care has been put into the new graphics with textured backgrounds, foregrounds, props and animated objects in both the dungeon and palace levels. This game doesn’t just add a splash of colour, but adds to presentation. The NTSC version has text telling the story, but the PAL version has numerous dark cutscenes. The game over screen is pretty chilling. Pity that the boxart doesn’t resemble what you see in-game, but it looks okay. Finally the level music tracks blend well with the deadly atmosphere and are faithful to Francis Mechner‘s composition, though they are only in the PAL version.

Gameplay for the most part is faithful to the DOS port, apart from the sword fighting. In this PAL version, you get four extra challenging levels. If you’re used to puzzles in Prince of Persia 2, then these levels will be a real treat for you. Of course if you’re not up to the challenges you can enter a password to skip levels. Other extras include new exclusive types of potions with incredible effects.

The Bad
You might be awestruck by the brilliantly coloured and painted makeover, but careful attention to detail wasn't really applied everywhere. The guards are all the same colour, just like the Atari ST and Amstrad CPC versions. And for the Prince's shadow, the artists lazily did a recoloured palette of the prince and nothing that even resembles a shadow. The potions are coloured in such a way that you can’t tell exactly what they do, so you might accidentally poison the prince, though you can memorise the good and bad potions since they stay the same every new game.

The way that the controls work are partly broken for a couple of reasons. One of them is the slow, clunky movement, which feels almost a second late to pressing the D-pad. As a result you can't really mimic the glitchy tricks and moves that you could in the DOS version. At least you can jump past guards if you time your jumps correctly. Running through spikes only works if you're in the middle of the spikes and not running from the edge of them. The other major problem is the combat system. You don't parry using the up direction, but with the jump button, and it's completely useless, because when your parrying is hit, you sail back a bit so you don't get within a striking distance. Instead you have to carefully time your sword blows so that you accurately hit your opponent and hope that you don't get stabbed first. Finally the crouch ability is useless, as it doesn't let you crawl anywhere, you just squat down idly on the ground. What a waste of controls that only do half the functions!

The Bottom Line
The Megadrive version certainly took many steps up from its US Genesis counterpart with impressive added visuals and extra levels. But extravagant graphical makeovers alone are not enough to make a perfectly playable game. While there is added challenge for the hardcore platformer players, it's not going to work in their favour. If the problems with the controls could be fixed and the graphics tweaked a little bit more here and there, I would give this one high praise next to the SNES version. I'm not disappointed, but I'm not content. This title is deserving of being tried and played through, but it will take more time than the limited time before you can get used to the way it works. Similarly to Data East’s SMS port of Captain Silver the European release gets more features and longer gameplay than the US release. Go for PAL if you want to enjoy the full experience of the game. Shame we don’t get to see the Genesis/Megadrive features in POP mods.

The Good
Well, the creator spent a pretty time animating the characters and it shows.. the animation is incredibly fluid and good-looking.. modern people would probably not believe that it has been drawn instead of 3d-rendering.. Also, the motif has been captured well.

The Bad
Well, the dungeons all look the same and one or two of the puzzles can cause you to scratch your head for some time..

The Bottom Line
An interesting platform game that has next to nothing to do with 'regular' platform games like Sonic and Mario.

The Good
I love the graphics in Prince of Persia. In a time when good VGA/MCGA graphics were hard to come by, this game just blew me away. The rotoscoping was something I'd never seen before and the details were more than what you would expect. The level design was also quite strong with lots of variations and challenges. The gameplay also worked quite nicely with smooth transitions between the different moves. Everything felt quite fluid and flowed nicely. And of course the action and puzzle solving had almost perfect balance. There was enough action so keep you on your toes, but not so much that it distracted from the ultimate goal.

The Bad
The sound effects were quite weak and the music was non existent. However, I always felt that early PC games with music never quite worked right. The music was always an afterthought and not something that was part of the game. So, in a sense I'm glad they didn't do anything there.

The Bottom Line
You have to rescue the princess from the evil Jaffar. You've been thrown into the dungeons and have 60 minutes to escape and save the princess from being forced to marry Jaffar or face death. On your way, you will have to battle numerous enemies and solve countless puzzles. Time is your constant enemy. You can't go too fast and make a fatal mistake but at the same time you mustn't loiter around. A must for all gamers.