Introduction

A thousand sultans? We're going to stick with only one sultan today, thank you very much.

Welcome to Prince of Persia!

Having juggled between several different game titles to do a Let's Play thread of, I figured out that this game would be a perfect candidate for a thread. First released in 1989 on the Apple II computer by Jordan Mechner and ported on many other platforms soon after, this game really has everything a great game needs: it has a minimal story in order to set the tone for the game, a princess in distress, a prince (and lover) who happens to never die, millions of guards armed with swords, nasty deathtraps, and most importantly... remote gates that are activated by nearby touchplates. Really, it cannot get any better than that.

Wait a minute... didn't you do a Let's Play of this game 2 years ago? You even copy-pasted that text from your old thread!

Well, yeah. I played the PC version of the game. But this time, we will be interested into the SNES version, which was made by Konami and released in 1992, 3 years after the original game. This game is a completely different affair and while some of the portions in the game will reminisce you of the original, the levels are completely different. Layouts have been changed, the graphics have been overhauled to use the SNES capabilities, and the game is about twice as long. The original game had 12 levels, this SNES version has 20. To compensate for this larger scale of the game, you now have 2 hours to save the princess from the clutches of the evil vizier, Jaffar.

Don't think this game is just the same 12 levels than Prince of Persia has while tacking on 8 bonus levels on top, like a chocolate cake where you'd pour oranges over it and call it a night. Some of the old levels are twisted enough that they feel entirely new, it introduces many new foes to fight, new traps, obstacles and even brand new places to explore. More than half of the levels in this version are completely original, it features a new final boss battle, and it even throws in a few bosses to fight along the way. Most of the old favorites are back, including things such as the slowfall potion, the upsidedown potion and most importantly, the life-extending potion. All in all, while some of the new content doesn't stack up well to the original, this version is still worth playing, as it's a new take on the original Prince of Persia game that started it all and some of the new content also is very good.

I'm also going to play Prince of Persia 2 for the SNES, but it's not worthy of any space or description in this OP whatsoever. This version sucks and it can eat a bag of dicks.

Another reason I chose this game is that, while mostly everyone talks about how great the Ubisoft Prince of Persia games are, most forget where the series have begun and rarely ever acknowledge the game that started everything. Back then, Prince of Persia was a fairly innovative adventure/platformer game, it was a difficult but rewarding game and it was one of the few games to do time limits correctly, which usually is considered a derided game mechanic. Even though you'd see most of the obstacles in the game fairly early, the game still would surprise you from level to level, with its constantly changing arrangement of traps, guards and puzzles. This is the kind of game you want to showcase to people, and I first did it even though I wasn't sure people would even understand me since English wasn't my main language. This is what striked me in 2007 LPs, it was essentially just a bunch of people playing through a video game with their honest reactions, something you could relate or compare to, without really trying to impress anyone. You would just have fun playing a game and hopefully invite people to have fun as well.

Anyway, this thread is starting off with a double update and two videos might be posted at any given update, considering the shorter lengths of the videos. Hope you enjoy!

Videos

The Let's Play Archive

Prince of Persia (SNES)

by Psychedelic Eyeball

Introduction

Videos