RePlay: Prince of Persia Saga
Over the past two years or so, between one hardware upgrade and another, I was able to achieve one of my oldest goals ever gaming-wise. After very long delays and several purchases of original copies, now I can proudly shelve the aforementioned completed goal and move on to something else. In recent times, I was saying, I finally played the entire Prince of Persia saga, going through the games I already knew inside out and experiencing the most recent titles which were still missing in my gamer curriculum.
Replaying Prince of Persia complete series has been a long, sometimes tiresome journey which brought gratification and interesting discoveries as well. For example, I found that the Windows legendary backward compatibility with Win32 historical software hides bizarre secrets you can only access through some random stroke of luck, and that my taste in video games is essentially not that different than 30 years ago. Therefore, to properly celebrate the goal, I drafted this short “diary” hovering between technical issues, gameplay and memories, drowning it in an excessive amount of screenshots chosen from a total archive of more than 2,000 images (or maybe more) as well. Moreover, I also made the most of the tests and study (and the stress) that I lately devoted to the very complex and troublesome art of real-time video recording on PC. A topic that cost me many sleepless nights as usual, and which I hope to write about at length in the future.
Prince of Persia (1990)
The MS-DOS version of the first Prince of Persia is a true classic, that marked the beginning of the gaming career for many fans. Myself including, as I discovered this strange thing named “computer video games” by watching, in the early Nineties, those magical pixels of the imprisoned prince moving on the green monochrome screen of a friend’s Olivetti PC (286?). Mind you: I had already lost my gaming virginity with arcade games, but the impact of PoP’s graphics smoothness, gameplay and atmosphere was such that I still remember my first encounters with the game almost 30 years later. After watching it from afar, of course, I later experienced PoP’s magic firsthand on my first PC (the legendary 286 at 16MHz). And I never stopped playing it, considering that PoP has been with me on every PC I owned in every possible variant.
Jordan Mechner himself regards the MS-DOS version of his game as the definitive one, while for me replaying PoP in a serious way is like going back to the Nineties: manual skills are always there, practically muscle memory, and I just need a couple of attempts to return to almost the same levels of platformic mastery I had in the past (ie completing the game in less than half an hour). For the RePlay I used PoP version 1.4, copied from one of the many original CDs I purchased over the years; this version is slightly different than the other ones, as it includes updated sound effects and various color schemes for the dungeons which were exclusively gray in color before. A new unusual finding, at least for me as I had never noticed in 30 years of tumbles and acrobatic jumps in 2D…
Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame (1993)
PoP shocked the player with rotoscoped graphics and cinematic approach to game storytelling, making up for a rather poor design in terms of variety of levels and characters. In Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame, on the other hand, the poor running prince must go through much more varied and richer sceneries, going from a levels set to another one in harmony with the ever more cinematic tale behind the game. In fact, replaying PoP 2 once again feels like the developers put a lot of efforts into trying to always surprise the player by offering new challenges and new “things” to see almost at every step. The Shadow and the Flame is besides much more generous with the secondary elements of the story, with many cutscenes, digitized narrating voice (not exactly the norm for PC games in the early Nineties), in-game animations and more.
But PoP 2 is unfortunately also rich in frustration, given that the difficulty of the challenge increases considerably. PoP 2 is a difficult game, extremely difficult for modern standards, certainly it’s the fourth hardest game I have ever completed. Every step brings a surprise, as I said, but that surprise generally tends to kill you in the most brutal and senseless way. I remember that in the Nineties I punched and literally tore apart a couple of (AT) keyboards, and PoP 2 will surely have been one of the triggers for such a fury (besides my shitty life back then). Today I’m much calmer, and my Corsair mechanical keyboard doesn’t run the slightest risk of being violently abused considering how much I paid for it and how fond I am of it. Nevertheless The Shadow and the Flame continues to be an old-fashioned challenge, not suitable for irresolute players, and the ability to “conquer” the game that I once had doesn’t seem attainable anymore – especially because I have 10,000 other games to try and a semblance of AFK life to continue in one way or another.
Prince of Persia 3D (1999)
The first fully three-dimensional incarnation of PoP is released around the end of the century, a period when 3D graphics had abandoned its first “experimental” vocation, winning – often improperly – almost the entire market of gaming productions. A game with a troublesome history, this Prince of Persia 3D, with several ownership changes for the development team and a decidedly marginal role for series creator Jordan Mechner (here listed simply as “creative consultant”). The polygon graphics-based platform genre had now become a thing for the infamous archeologist with pointy tits (Tomb Raider), and PoP 3D attempt to take back the lead ultimately failed.
Prince of Persia 3D is a game full of flaws, bugs and various inconsistencies, even though graphics are nice (for a 20 years old game) and they occasionally manage to evoke the arabesqued atmosphere of One Thousand and One Nights as in the original design. The combat system is decent, even entertaining at times, despite the issues of game clearly released ahead of time. It doesn’t exhibit the same difficulty level as The Shadow and The Flame, but PoP 3D also has its fair moments of frustration moreover worsened by a much slower and cumbersome gameplay compared to 2D platforms. The biggest frustration, however, concerns the technical questions: running Prince of Persia 3D on Windows 10 has been a true nightmare, a crushing experience which took me weeks of sleepless nights to reach a positive ending. And the happy (?) final result was reached by chance, as I will explain in detail in a future post.
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003)
Four years after the half disaster of PoP 3D, Ubisoft and Jordan Mechner work together on yet another remake of the original platform game. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time turns out to be much better than the previous chapter, and is perhaps my favorite game in the series. A geometric experience in its essentiality, with an extremely satisfying gameplay based on platforms, wall runs, magical daggers and perfectly animated acrobatic fights. Sure you have to adapt to the game’s flawed code (idiotic cameras, bugs), but once you get in sync with the game’s world you can fully enjoy what is universally considered one of the best games ever made.
As with the first PoP, in the The Sands of Time I just need very little to find myself in an atmosphere I know perfectly well and where I always lose myself in with extreme pleasure. The original PoP is a game that tells a story, SoT is a story told through a game. A story that begins where it ends, and ends where it begins, in full compliance with the main theme: time and its manipulation. Maybe the greatest story ever told in a video game. Enjoyment of the experience on modern PCs is aided by a remarkable compatibility of the base code, which needs just a couple of small patches (mostly to correctly set widescreen resolution), a frame rate limited to 60 fps (to avoid bizarre bugs like the invisible enemies in the prison stage) and a ISO copy of the original DVD mounted on a virtual drive to relive the acrobatic feats of King Shahraman’s brave son on screen.
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within (2004)
Making a somewhat crude comparison, the second chapter of the new “modern” PoP trilogy is to SoT as The Shadow and the Flame is to the original platform. The Prince featured in Warrior Within is a soldier hardened by battle and experience, a disillusioned hero who is now forced to fight an impossible fight against the supernatural creature hunting him after having unleashed the sands of time. Like PoP 2, WW significantly increases the difficulty bar compared to SoT – even though we are not at those levels of nonsense and I remembered the game to be much harder than what I actually experienced during the RePlay anyway.
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within turns the essential and elegant fights of SoT in a brutal and bloody affair, a deadly dance where foes end up beheaded or split in two – horizontally or vertically. The game’s world is much larger and it can be freely explored, at least on the surface, while Time Portals let you visit the same scenes in different time periods (past or present) for an even more varied and interesting challenge. WW even includes two endings, depending on the number of hidden locations discovered by the player while trying to unlock a special sword at the end. WW offers more or less the same compatibility level as SoT (60 fps, widescreen pach, ISO dump), while sound doesn’t work in some short cutscenes forcing the user to enable subtitles. I thought this was an issue of the game version I owned but it seems to be a more general problem.
Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones (2005)
With The Two Thrones, the PoP saga gives up on WW’s free exploration to return to a more conventional “on the rails” journey like in SoT. The new chapter’s gameplay is a mix of SoT predefined settings and WW “free combat” mode, plus the all-new silent kills that, all things considered, are simply a series of QTE sequences depending from the foe to knock down. And they’re also annoying during boss fights. Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones is set on the streets, palaces and the legendary Babylon’s gardens, with much richer and enjoyable graphics than SoT and a less gloomy one compared to WW. After pleasing the Dahaka, the Prince has now to deal with a new “instability factor” consisting of the Dark Prince, a game mode that changes priorities – the life bar gradually goes down with no new sand stocks – and turns into a real fight for survival in a couple of situations at least.
Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones is the worthy concluding chapter of the trilogy started with The Sands of Time, perhaps not as memorable but still a must for hardcore PoP fans. Too bad it also is the most troublesome to run on Windows 10-based modern systems (PoP 3D aside), considering that you need to apply several patches (widescreen, censorship removal), disable in-game anti-aliasing (using the one in the NVIDIA drivers instead) and force the usual 60 fps cap to avoid experiencing every sort of bugs that make overcoming some sections impossible. Even worse, from my experience (the most recent one but also the one on my old Pentium 4, if my memory hasn’t rotten yet) you need to force an even more tighter “on-the-fly” limit (30 fps) to get through a critical jump before the final clash.
Prince of Persia (2008)
In 2008, on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of SoT release, Ubisoft publishes yet another reboot of a series doomed to perpetually reinvent itself. Prince of Persia is one of those games I was planning to experience since forever, a chapter of the PoP saga that was almost completely unknown to me – except for some very brief “test drives” I did some years ago on a wrecked laptop now in a landfill – that leaves behind almost every trait of the series until then. The Prince returns to be a good for nothing, an adventurer who has lost his donkey and runs “by chance” into a princess with magical powers. The story is even more influenced by ancient Persia myths, a theme which is a real delight for a mythology enthusiast like yours truly.
Prince of Persia focuses almost exclusively on exploration with a vast and freely navigable game’s world, where the player can really choose at will what settings and what challenges to face first thanks to a smart and flexible system of special unlockable powers. Platforming is nice too, while fights are dumbed down despite the remarkable show put on screen. In fact Prince of Persia is an easy game, nay extremely easy compared to the past PoP, pretty much a “mainstream” experience where you cannot die even if you want to – princess Elika is always there ready to save you. If you can come to terms with this mainstream calling, Prince of Persia can offer an interactive journey that’s still worth the trouble anyway – also thanks to the cel-shaded graphics that stands the test of time remarkably well. Compatibility with Windows 10 is flawless, even though I had to create links to the game’s exe (and to launcher, manual, readme…) on the Desktop and in the Start Menu by hand.
Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands (2010)
For the latest chapter in the saga, unknown to me just like the previous game, Ubisoft changes everything once again and goes back to the past. The adventurer fighting against the god of darkness Angra Mainyu/Ahriman was but a dream, and the “true” story is the one that began with The Sands of Time in 2003. Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands is indeed some kind of SoT side-quest, a brief interlude before the events of WW where the Prince has to deal with an older brother that’s a bit of an asshole and a sand army born from the power of Jinn. The open world approach is completely abandoned, now the path to travel is so pre-defined that even the camera refuses to focus on level parts away from those destined to be traversed by the Prince.
Neglected in the 2008 games, in The Forgotten Sands environment puzzles once again become one of the gameplay key elements. The Prince has new powers he can control the elements of nature with, so he can enhance attacks or change the configuration of the game’s world by solidifying water streams, brining buildings of the past back to life and more. Powers of nature aside, combat is – if possible – even more stupid and simplified than in PoP 2008, with a single basic attack that makes you bitterly regret SoT’s acrobatic dancing on a blade’s edge. Here the quantity of enemies on screen has to make up for the very poor quality of gameplay, with huge mobs of sand monsters to put down through linear combos enhanced by the aforementioned elemental powers. Everything’s really mediocre, even considering that, from a technology standpoint, The Forgotten Sands is a true horror made of always-on DRMs, multiple net clients (the original Uplay doesn’t exist anymore, now you need to download Ubisoft Connect and then link the game already installed from the DVD disk in some way I don’t remember now) and other digital trash that really pisses off a cloud-hating gamer like me. Ubisoft, you really suck shit.
A Prince’s future
During the 20 long years from the first game to the latest release, Prince of Persia has kept good company to the many players who love to be told a story and live it firsthand on the PC screen at the same time. In its various forms, reboots and remakes, PoP has essentially remained faithful to this approach despite the constantly changing technologies, developers and market trends. Jordan Mechner, the designer who started it all, still hangs out around ancient Persia and he has expressed his interest in making a new game. Even better, there’s even the chance that Ubisoft would introduce some important news on this front very soon. Personally I owe a lot to the Prince of Persia saga as a gamer but also for my passion for stories and the evocative power of imagination, and I can’t help but thank Mechner once again for his creations. The first part of the PoP chronicles is now archived, I can’t wait to start a new chapter of the immortal oriental stories full of arabesques, begging princes, powerful jinn spirits and journeys to fantastic places.