Prince Of Persia - Completion, Kudos, Bonuses

Thanks to GameSpot for their feature documenting the final hours of development on Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time, Ubisoft's update of the classic '80s platform adventure. The piece follows the development team as they squash the final, most obscure bugs, such as "...the disappearance of the head of the female character, Farah, if you leave the game on for more than 12 consecutive hours", and elsewhere, IGN PS2 rate the results as "the perfect realization of the franchise in 3D." GameSpy also has a set of features on the game, with the Xbox version's review largely positive, proclaiming "this prince is no pauper", while 1UP spell out the bonuses for each version, including "PS2: The entire original Prince of Persia... Xbox: The entire original Prince of Persia 2... GC/GBA: The entire original Prince of Persia, unlockable via the GBA or GameCube."

Why the original was great...

[Pyro226]

One of the best things about the original game was the one hour time limit and unlimited lives system. Almost all of the games back then had a system where you got X number of lives and sometimes Y number of continues and that was it. The system isn't much different today, except that in many games you get one life, but you can reload your saves until you get carpel-tunnel syndrome. In prince of persia you have unlimited lives; you respawn at the start of the level, of which there are 12, but you only have 60 minutes to complete the game. And I must say that getting to the last boss with a minute and a half left on the clock is much more nerve racking that getting to the end of a FPS with 15 health, because even with 15 health you can always shoot dodge save, shoot dodge save...

Other aspects of the ingenuity of the game also stand out. You could do an amazing number of things with just the four arrow keys and shift, which are the only controls in the game. I won't bore you with all of them, but the system is truely ingenius, although the sword fights could have been a little more complicated.

I also loved the doppleganger; it took me so many tries to figure out how to defeat him at the end of the game. Ever time you hit him it hurts you, if you have more health than him then you die when you kill him anyway, all of the ledges nearby are fatal falls (so you can't just knock him down to a lower level), and if you try to run past him he'll just kill you.

I still have Prince of Persia (the original DOS version) on my laptop, and I play it when I'm bored and I have ~45 minutes to kill.

(/Nostalgia)