Recently this trailer for the new Prince of Persia (PoP) installment has really got my hyped about it’s upcoming release. (btw, the song is this trailer is Breath Me by Sia, I think it’s perfect)

It got me thinking about how much I love the PoP series. Even from it’s old Rotoscoping days I’ve loved it. I remember playing it for the first time over at a friends house on their commodore amiga and being blown away. The rotoscoping of the Prince made his movements look so realistic, also his movements where very human, when he ran fast you needed to allow a certain amount of space to stop him before he fell off a ledge. This game also had something no previous game I’d played had. It had gore. I mean the gore might of only been a few red pixels on the screen, and definitely tame by todays standards, but it was so real. When you ran through a patch of spikes or a set of guillotine jaws suddenly your character fell to the ground and his white uniform was now covered in red. Sadly I never completed the original. I had a brief period of re-interest in it when I was in college as it would run on the PC’s there. The funny thing about it also was that the audio would transmit over the PC’s built in warning speaker (it is normally used to warn you of system errors with successive beeps) so you could always tell in lab who was playing the original PoP by the amount of noise their PC would be making.

Aside from that I left the series alone for a good while, but in 2006, having a void of no games to play I decided to give the new trilogy of PoP games a shot. I was blown away. Played back to back the new PoP series is some of the finest gaming you’ll ever experience. The gameplay is balanced, the controls are intuitive, the story is interesting and the combat does not get repetitive. The artistic styling of the game world is also simply stunning. However there has been much debate about which game in the trilogy is the best.

The first one, The Sands of Time, was the original so it has the nostalgic advantage of being the first to introduce us to the gameplay, environments and combat. The second, Warrior Within, went a lot grittier and darker, replacing the explosion of sand when you dispatch a baddie with actual blood. The soundtrack also went very grungy and the Prince himself started to look very Emo and somehow had had the time since the first game to get tatoos all over his right arm (if you watch the “making of” doc included with the game you’ll see his tatoos are identical to the ones on the lead designers arm) A lot of people didn’t like this change, personally, I’m glad the art department had the guts to break mold and try something new. I felt the combat was greatly improved with Warrior within, my only gripe was the levels. Instead of the linear approach of the first they went for an approach similar to the original whereby the levels crisscrossed each other. It made for a better maze system and better puzzling solving, but at times I would leave the game and then come back to it and have forgotten which of the numerous paths I had to take.

The third, The Two Thrones, really sealed the deal for me. It went back to the ethereal stylings of the first but kept the combat systems of the second. It also went back to being linear, much to my delight, like the first. I think if the 2nd hadn’t changed the artstyle as much as it did the 3rd would not of seemed so great. The contrast between the 2nd and 3rd really made it shine and a pleasure to play. The ending was also perfect, it answered the questions in the storyline and brought the series full circle to explain aspects of the first. All in all though the trilogy should not really be viewed as 3 separate parts but rather as a whole, and as a whole the series is excellent and complete.

Which is mainly why, when I heard they where making another PoP game, the feeling was bittersweet. I wanted to play more of the Prince of Persia but the completeness of the previous 3 meant that this would now be broken. The more I’ve known about and seen the art direction of the new game the more I’ve liked it. The dialog seems a little cheesy, obviously to pander to the younger or casual market, but the gameplay innovations and immersive environments will probably save it for me.

We’ll have to wait and see though. Watch this space for a review of the new installment once it gets released.

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