Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

aka: Bosi Wangzi: Shi zhi Sha, Princ Persii: Peski Vremeni, Prince of Persia 4, Prince of Persia: Jikan no Suna, Prince of Persia: Las Arenas del Tiempo, Prince of Persia: Le Sabbie del Tempo, Prince of Persia: Les Sables du Temps, Prince of Persia: Piaski Czasu, Prince of Persia: Písky času
Moby ID: 11185
PlayStation 2 Specs
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Description official descriptions

The King and the Prince of Persia are besieging the Maharajah's castle to plunder the treasures hidden inside. In order to impress his father, the Prince sneaks inside to recover the magical Dagger of Time. He quickly learns that this dagger has the ability to control time. The malevolent Vizier has other plans for the dagger, however, and tricks the Prince into unlocking a mysterious secret of the Dagger that causes the King and many of his subjects to be turned into sand zombies. Now, the Prince must figure out what has happened and try to set things right again.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is an action game with platforming and puzzle-solving elements. It updates many of the gameplay concepts from the previous games, and brings them into a fully three-dimensional world. The Prince will engage in sword fighting, wall climbing, spike dodging, puzzle solving, and more in his quest. The Prince also carries the Dagger of Time, which allows him to unleash several magical powers. The most important of these powers is the ability to reverse time. This ability allows the player to reverse their actions when they lead the Prince to his death.

Spellings

  • Принц Персии: Пески Времени - Russian spelling
  • 波斯王子:时之砂 - Simplified Chinese spelling
  • 波斯王子:遺忘之砂 - Traditional Chinese spelling

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Credits (PlayStation 2 version)

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Reviews

Critics

Average score: 91% (based on 115 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.9 out of 5 (based on 246 ratings with 10 reviews)

Behold the dawning of a new standard in action/platforming.

The Good

“Most people think of time as a river, flowing swift and sure in one direction. But I have seen the face of time, and I can tell you they are wrong: Time is an ocean in a storm. Sit down, and I will tell you a tale like none you have ever heard.”


The persian king Shahraman and his army return home after a great victory over the indian maharajah, with bags full of treasures and new women for the king's harem. In the way they stop to visit the rajah's palace. As a sign of friendship, king Shahraman gives the rajah an enormous and beautiful hourglass. The rajah approaches it with wondering eyes. “Why are the sands glowing?”, he asks.

The former maharajah's vizier, now at king Shahraman's service, steps forward and explains: “These are the Sands Of Time. Inside this hourglass there lies a marvel like none ever seen by any man. But alas, only the Dagger of Time can unlock the hourglass...”

The vizier stares at king Shahraman's son. The Dagger is the treasure the young prince claimed as his own.

Farah, daughter of the maharajah and now a prisoner of the persian king, makes an attempt at a warning: “Don't do it!” --but it's too late. The prince of Persia already sank the dagger in a key-lock mechanism on the hourglass.

As the hourglass opens, something is released with the sands. Whatever it is has certainly never been seen by any man... but it isn't any kind of marvel either.


Prince of Persia - The Sands of Time (from now on we'll just call it PoP, shall we? there's a 20KB limitation for reviews at this website... which I'm now closer to clash with, thanks to this pointless observation) takes the flag of an old side-scrolling platformer created by a wiz called Jordan Mechner, which made history with its incredibly realistic character animation, imaginative platform puzzles, and complex sword-based battle system. In 1989 Prince of Persia would set a standard in platform games, being in time followed by the likes of Another World and Flashback. Even though there have been one or two official sequels to Prince of Persia in the past, none of them managed to cause the shock the first one did.

Now, in this era of floating-point calculated 3D environments, massive poly-count motion-captured character models, and multiple programmable per-pixel shading effects, Ubisoft Montreal comes up with another heir to the legend, trying to set new standards.


THE VISUALS: The mandatory DX9 bells & whistles

Talking about good looking graphics is almost a waste of time nowadays. Even in those rare cases in which the character models don't sport mind-bendingly huge amounts of polygons, the programmable pixel and vertex shaders allow a fairly easy implementation of a sheer amount of special effects.

PoP is a good example of the above sentence. The models actually have a VERY low amount of polygons (more on this in a minute); but the textures, the shadows, the lighting, the special effects, the design of the environments, the details in the decorations --they are all impressive enough as to divert your attention and even make you think: “Wow, this game looks amazing!”, not noticing that the maharajah's daughter doesn't even have fingers in her hands.

There's an option to apply a lighting effect called "bloom", which gives graphics some sort of misty quality and works as a surprisingly effective inhibitor for the infamous jaggies, and at the same time adds nicely to the general Arabian Nights' Tales theme.

Furthermore, there's the treat of watching it all in motion. It's simply amazing. The camera makes all these crazy zooms and pans and whatnot, transforming each jumping puzzle in a small action movie. In this regard, the cutscenes show a brilliant direction and sport all those effects we are so used to see in modern action movies: Odd camera takes, slow-motion movement, physics-defying acrobatics, et cetera. There are a few pre-rendered cutscenes (at the beginning and near the ending), but the ones with in-game graphics have little to envy from them anyway.


SOUND & MUSIC: Iran Rocks!

I don't usually pay much attention to music in games, since only in a few, rare occasions I found a soundtrack I considered worth of mention. Well, PoP is one of those rare examples.

As I said many times before, I suck at describing music, so I'll go through the heresy of calling these "some sort of mixture between typical arabian music and rock n' roll guitars".

That might very well not tell you anything, but just stay on me: The music is great, it matches the action perfectly, and it's so good you might consider hunting down the soundtrack. After you beat the game the credits roll with a beautiful vocal song that alone makes the whole experience worth it.

Finally, I played the spanish version of PoP, which is fully dubbed. Whoever played the spanish version of any game knows how awful the dubbing actors usually are, and if you can compare, it's heart-grindingly painful to hear how badly they butcher the original acting --well for the first time ever I don't have a single complaint about the voices.

I ignore who did the spanish dubbing in this game, but they did a solid work.


GAMEPLAY: Define "smooth"

Simply put, PoP offers the smoothest gameplay system ever --EVER.

Oddly enough, you get to perform a lot of combat movements with one single attack button, depending on contextual circumstances such as the direction you move while attacking, or the position of the enemies around you: Slash one enemy in front of you, and move the stick back pressing attack again, and our good prince will perform an elegant counter strike manoeuvre against whoever was lurking behind him. Move towards an enemy and press jump, and the prince will vault over him and land right behind, blades shining, ready to give some soup. Run towards a wall and press jump twice, and the prince will rebound-jump off the wall, vaulting over the nearest enemy. Press the attack button repeatedly while pointing towards each enemy around you and, as long as there are targets at hand, the prince will engage in a deadly and elegant ballet of hack & slash combos, taking down everything in his path. Block an enemy blow in the exact moment the blades clash and press the attack button, and the prince will kick the enemy and take him down with his sword.

At times, you get to pull so many different moves in a single fight that you might wonder whether you're actually playing or just pointlessly shaking the sticks and hitting buttons to an awesome cutscene.

For the better part of the game you'll enjoy the company of Farah, the maharajah's daughter. She will help you solving some puzzles, and as she has a bow and arrows she'll also help in the fights. Farah happens to be a fairly good fighter, so this is one of those extremely rare games in which your sidekick not only is far from a burden, but she's actually useful! Oh the shock!


All the fantastic combat moves I just talked about are nothing when it comes to the prince's abilities to face the platform puzzles.

This agile lad can walk, run, jump, hang from ledges, climb up / slide down ladders and columns, walk across tightropes, swing on ropes, swing on flagpoles, shimmy across ledges, rebound-jump off walls, and my favourite: Run up and along walls.

Yep, our man in Persia can actually walk on walls. Neo was a fag.

As you might have guessed, all these movements can be combined in order to come up with some outstanding acrobatic combos, and in fact you will be required to do so, as the game focuses heavily in progressively harder platform puzzles.

For example, let's say you come doing the merry shimmy across a ledge, until you a see another ledge above you. Jump, grab, pull yourself up. Solid ground, phew. But then walk a few steps and, crap, a large chasm, across which you can see a flagpole. So you take a deep breath, start running along the wall (while running you come across a few hanging banners, which will nicely wave as you run by them), and once you're in the right spot you rebound-jump off the wall and grab the flagpole. Swing on it, and jump off towards the nearby wall, off of which you'll rebound-jump and grab a ledge above the flagpole. Turns out this ledge is right at the bottom of a narrow chimney-like vertical space, so you'll jump forward, rebound-jump off the wall, and you'll start a rebound-jumping-spree between enclosed walls until you climbed high enough as to grab another ledge. Pull yourself up. Phew, solid ground again...

The design of these platform puzzles is simply brilliant, basically requiring you to solve them in two stages: First figuring out the course you'll have to take, and second actually running through that course.

As you progress in the game, the platform puzzles will grow larger and more complex, requiring you to combine more and more acrobatics in order to beat them, and eventually featuring timed sections so properly timing your movements becomes a factor as well... rest assured you won't get bored easily.


But there is more! Throughout the game there are a number of "regular" puzzles, the kind of massive room-sized puzzles we found in Soul Reaver 2. Much like it happens with the platform puzzles, these are cleverly designed as to be challenging but never annoying. You can figure these puzzles out pretty easily from the get-go, but the actual work comes in putting the pieces together.

For example, at one point in the game you need to re-arrange a number of mirrors in a large two-stories library in order to get a thin stream of sunlight to trigger a certain photosensitive device. Fairly easy to figure out, it does require some thinking in the actual solving, as I think every puzzle should be.


Of course, maybe you're like me, and you still want more --well THERE IS MORE!

From the moment you get the Dagger of Time, you'll be granted access to its several time-bending powers, among which count the ability to freeze enemies, slow down time (yep, much like Max Payne's bullet-time), and roll back ten seconds in time, thus gaining the opportunity to save the prince from a miscalculated jump or a treacherous back-stab, and even resurrect him from a recent death.

You can't possibly imagine how handy this last feature comes when you screw up the last jump of a long platform puzzle.

Finally, one thing that made me remember the recent Legacy of Kain - Defiance: The camera. While I recently said elsewhere that the "cinematic camera" in Defiance enhances the action greatly, I also admitted it wasn't without a number of problems, enough to even get some people to understandably hate it.

PoP, on the other hand, simply sports the best camera ever seen. Not only it makes some nice-looking cinematic shots by itself every now and then, but you can also control it at every moment.

And I do mean CONTROL IT.

You can zoom out to the point the whole scene looks like a 3D version of Lemmings or you can zoom in as close as to see the hair in the prince's ear (ah, OK, maybe not THAT much). You can examine the area from a first person perspective, you can make the camera turn 360º around your character... You be the director.


Reading all this, you might think: “Jeeesus Christ in a motorbike! How complicated can be to perform all those things!?!”.

Well, it is not.

Controlling the prince and getting him to chain up the craziest combo of acrobatics while at the same time fighting four enemies could only be any easier if you could just project your mind onto the prince and command him through pure thought.

Barring that, playing with mouse and keyboard is as smooth as it gets. No control interface designed by a human being so far has been more user-friendly than this. Period.

Furthermore, if you're the lucky owner of a dual-stick gamepad, rejoice: You're in a gamer's paradise.


THE STORY: A cheese-free love story

When I started playing the game I thought of the story as a predictable and unsurprising "The Prince vs The Evil vizier" cliched tale. Since the gameplay was so enjoyable I didn't really care to think much more about it.

Then Farah showed up and we formed this team, and as the game progressed, these guys started this childlike push & pull, constantly going forth and back between fighting and flirting. Whenever I was left alone with the prince, his voiceovers made clear the way his feelings towards the girl were growing deeper by the minute. Granted, the outcome of this relationship could be guessed from the get-go, but the tale was told with so much class, a few humorous moments, and a surprising lack of cheap cheesiness, that it was totally enjoyable.

In fact, this "troublesome love story" sub-plot was much more enjoyable than the "main" story arc itself... until all of a sudden, in the last five minutes of gameplay, I came to understand the full joke. The whole "chase the vizier and lock the infamous hourglass" was in fact the sub-plot, merely a vehicle for the love story.

At the end of the game it all ties up and connects with the very beginning, closing a perfect circle with a major twist which, however predictable, oozes style as few things I've ever seen.

The ending itself, meaning the very closing phrase uttered by the prince -not without a delightful touch of bitterness, by the way- is brilliant in its own simplicity. In fact, this has to be one of the most rewarding endings I ever came to enjoy.

And then there comes the beautiful vocal song I mentioned above to which the credits roll, and you can't possibly deny that the whole package spells perfection.



The Bad

This game has to be the first in a good while in which I can't find a thing to complain about. Everything I usually care about in a game is nicely covered here: Everything I just described performs quite nicely in my awfully low-end box, and I haven't found one single bug or glitch of any kind. Not even the ever-present clipping issues.

The one thing I could whine about has to be the poly-count, especially when it comes to character models. The prince is fairly good, but the other characters have a noticeable low amount of polygons.

This can be understandable in the enemies, given the huge size of the environments, the massive amount of actors showing on scene at once, and the brief life they're going to have anyway; but Farah's model suffers from the same problem, and it tells. Especially since she doesn't even have fingers in her hands, and you will see those disturbingly hideous hands in some close-ups during certain cutscenes.



The Bottom Line

I'm not into medieval mid-eastern settings at all. In fact, I neglected this game for as long as I knew of its existence, despite the multiple praises I kept hearing all over the place. However, the moment I got a chance to test-drive it, I could only think of one thing: I HAVE GOT to own this game.

Without actually inventing anything new, PoP simply puts together the most challenging and imaginative platform puzzles and the smoothest combat interface I can remember.

On top of this, a simple yet beautiful love story told with a stylish narrative, and a conclusion to remember for years to come.

After I finished this game, and as the credits started rolling to the beautiful song, I felt a fulfilling sense of satisfaction as I felt few times before. Only a few of MAJOR storytelling masterpieces such as Silent Hill 2 and Soul Reaver 2 made such a deep impression on me, and even about those I had several issues to complain about.

PoP undoubtedly deserves a honor seat among my favourite games ever.

Finally, as some have said, the game IS short. However, I don't think of this fact as PoP's fault; but as a downside of every other game out there, for not offering half of what this one does.

Windows · by Slug Camargo (583) · 2009

I feel as if I've live this moment before....

The Good
This was one of the first PS2 games I remember buying other than ICO.

I'll jump right on the graphics as usual. AMAZING! I new the PS2 was capable of these sort of graphics, but it's so much better when you actually get to see them in motion. I love the way the prince moves effortlessly across walls, it's so smooth and natural looking that no other games acrobatics can match it. The environments were dreamlike and absolutely surreal at times. The glowing ,sparkly fog in some of those levels could only work in this game. The character models could have been better as far as the hands were concerned, but that is such a small gripe compared to how wonderful they look. The monsters are all very imaginative and very challenging. Fara and the prince look exquisite and are some of the best I've ever seen on the PS2.

Now on to the sound. Half and half. Sometimes it's at the right volume, and sometimes it's far too low. I know some of it was for dramatic effect, but it can be to quiet for it's own good. The voice acting sometimes sounded rush but rarely stilted or stiff. But overall it was very well done and incredibly convincing. I also like the music, even if doesn't fit the age it's in.

The con-trolls were very intuitive and easy to learn after a few tries. There isn't much other than that to discuss in the con-troll department.

Now on to the gameplay. THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST ROCK SOLID GAMES I HAVE EVER PLAYED!!!! Seriously! Jumping from walls, running on walls, jumping off platforms precariously perched over bottomless pits, swinging from poles, and the revolutionary realtime rewind all come together for a amazing experience ! And something else I didn't experience in any other game before was how the story was told with minimal cutscenes. You'll be pulling a lever and the prince will start his tale from that particular point. The distance between save points was annoying, but not aggravating. Overall no major complaints here! Oh, and the load times are always short! No long waits! And one last note, the original Prince of Persia is a unlockable ! I never got past level two, but it's the original! Come on !

The Bad
Some of the sequences where you have to jump between walls was kind of hard. And some of the fights early on in the game could drain your patience if you didn't have a lot of it. And in the original game that you can unlock, I can't make that last jump in level two.

The Bottom Line
Get it ! you'll love it ! The best Prince of Persia game since the original is the best one since! No other sequel will ever match what this one did.

PlayStation 2 · by GAMEBOY COLOR! (1990) · 2007

Absolutely brilliant.

The Good
There are a lot of complimentary words in the English language. Of course, I'm not going to claim to know all of them. But I am going to claim that there isn't a doubt in my mind that every single one of them applies to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Unfortunately, the best I could come up with to describe this masterpiece was "absolutely brilliant," but believe me, I feel terribly guilty for my incompetence in finding a better suited description. So, due to my overwhelming feeling of guilt, I guess my only option is to tell you just why this game is "absolutely brilliant."

By far, the finest aspect of Sands of Time is the gameplay itself. There are two main parts to the gameplay: fighting battles and maneuvering obstacles. The true core of the game though lies in maneuvering obstacles. The main character, who we'll just refer to as "the Prince," as his true name is never actually revealed, has amazing acrobatic talents. He can run up and along walls, climb up and down polls, swing on bars, jump long distances, rebound between walls, and do whatever else the situation might require. The best thing about all of this is how realistically the Prince controls. His movements are the exact opposite of the usual jerky movements found in most other games. I could probably spend a good five or ten minutes just running around in a circle or zigzagging because of how fluidly the Prince moves.

But fluidity and grace aside, the real fun comes from applying the previously mentioned acrobatic abilities to the physical puzzles constantly encountered throughout the game. Let me give you an example. Say you come into a room high above the floor, and you want to get down to the bottom. So first, you have to drop down onto a ledge and scale across the wall. From the wall, you jump onto a broken column that is no longer connected to the floor, and from there jump onto a platform sticking out of the wall. From the platform, you run sideways across the wall, trigger a pressure plate, jump off the wall to a flagpole, and swing onto another platform summoned out by the pressure plate. And so on until you reach the bottom. The thing is, the situation I just explained (even if it was tough to follow...sorry) is an extremely simple one. Many of these puzzles can get quite complicated, especially when you start taking into account the varied traps that are placed throughout the palace you will be traversing.

Now, don't think that these physical puzzles are going to be the only brain-scratching situations you will encounter. Doing all those things are really quite exhilarating, and just plain fun to do. The real tough stuff comes in the few actual puzzles in the game. Those of you who have played "Ico" should have some idea of what these are like, although The Sands of Time's puzzles are exceptionally simple when compared to Ico's. The thought of these scared me at first, because puzzle solving isn't exactly my strong suit when it comes to video games. But these too are actually quite fun, and pretty rewarding when you finish them. For a quick example, there is one part in the game where you have to rearrange mirrors on the first and second floor of a library in order to hit a symbol on the wall with a thin stream of light and open a gate. For me, these puzzles certainly took a little while to figure out, but it also wasn't anything where I got bored because I didn't know what to do next (as it often happened in Ico.)

Well, enough with the adventure part of the game. Let's move on to the action. Like in the puzzles, the Prince's acrobatic abilities play an imperative role in successfully concluding a battle. The most helpful action in the game, for me anyway, was being able to vault over enemies. Yes, that's right...you jump onto an enemy, then jump over him. While in the air, you have the option of swinging your sword and knocking the enemy down. But not all enemies will let you vault over them. That is why you can jump off the wall and over the enemy, providing the same effect as the regular vault. You can also jump off the wall, but instead of jumping over the enemy, you'll dive directly in its direction, sword pointing straight out, again knocking him down. The option of blocking and counter-attacking are also present. In order to survive, all of these actions must be utilized to take advantage of each enemy's weakness.

Notice how I never said anything about actually killing an enemy in the last paragraph. That's because after the first five minutes of the game, it will be impossible. Due to the Prince's unintentional actions, every human being was turned into a sand creature. And, as we all know, you can't actually kill a sand creature, that's just foolish. But you can destroy it utterly by taking out its sand. Of course, that requires some sort of sand extracting weapon, something like the Dagger of Time maybe.

In order to truly get rid of an enemy, you must knock it down and stab it with the Dagger of Time, thus taking its sand. And when the Dagger fills up with enough sand, the fun really starts happening. With the dagger, and with enough sand, you can temporarily stop time for one enemy, temporarily slow down all time, rewind time, and even temporarily stop time for everything except you, allowing you to destroy a number of enemies in the blink of an eye. The most helpful of all these time control abilities is the power to rewind, because not only can you rewind time if you get hit by an enemy or misjudge a landing, you can rewind time after you have died, thus reviving yourself.

Assisting the wonderful gameplay are absolutely superb graphics. The Sands of Time has some of the most beautiful surroundings I've ever seen in a video game. Even during nighttime segments, this game just looks stunning.

Alright, so the gameplay is great and the graphics are gorgeous, but what about the story? Well, at first I thought it was going to be another horribly average story with a boring presentation. The basics of the story are that the Prince is tricked into unleashing a horrible evil upon the world, and it is up to the Prince, with the help of the spunky Farah, to contain this evil before it spreads, and stop the one responsible for the trickery.

After having completed the game, I'm still obliged to say it was fairly average, but in a good way. One neat thing about how the story is presented is that most of it happens during gameplay. Conversations between the Prince and Farah happen in real time, as well as when the Prince is expressing his thoughts to the player. At key parts of the story though, the game will convert to an FMV, each of which couldn't have possibly been better. But the best part about the story is the little twist at the end, something that when you see it will make you say, "Ohhh...now I get it," even though you thought you understood in the first place. Even though I feel a little cheated because I feel like I should have picked up on this little surprise beforehand, I was extremely pleased with how everything unfolded. All in all, I got much more from the story than I had originally expected.

One more noteworthy part of The Sands of Time is the theme song. The music that plays during gameplay is fine, it suits the game well, but it really isn't a huge part of the experience. But the theme song itself is something worth mentioning. Hearing it for the first time during the ending credits, the song is a modern take on traditional mid-eastern melodies. The music is fairly simple, but accompanied with smooth vocals, the song itself holds a charming quality I don't often hear in most songs.

The Bad
I have said time and time again that no masterpiece is perfect. And staying true to this statement, there is a huge problem I had with The Sands of Time. I beat this game in a little over a day, approximately thirty hours from the time I first started it up until I was watching the ending credits. My total gameplay time was a little more than eight hours. Today, I started the game again for fun, and I got through fifty percent of the game in about two and a half hours. I mean, I realize that a lot of work went into this game, I really do, but it is still unbelievably short. This game was, for lack of a better word, absolutely brilliant, but I only got to experience that brilliance for a day. It just saddens me that the experience was over so quickly.

The Bottom Line
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is one of the few games about which everything feels right. It's beautiful, it's challenging, it's humorous, and it's just plain fun. I beg of you, for your own sake, don't pass this game up, because you'd have to try real hard to dislike it.

PlayStation 2 · by DarkDove (63) · 2003

[ View all 10 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Random slowdowns... chirinea (47504) Aug 13, 2008
Which control is best for this? chirinea (47504) Feb 23, 2008

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Advertising

The Internet marketing for Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was Ubisoft's most successful campaign so far. Ad agency Digital Outlook targeted 15-24-year-old males with ads featuring characters from the game and its "acrobatic action gameplay". A DHTML overlay showing the Prince slicing through the computer screen with his sword had a click-through rate of 26.1%. A streaming video ad, showing the gameplay, had a click-through rate of 23.43%. These rates were 4x higher than the host site's average.

Armitt, Claire. Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time. (Case Study)" New Media Age. May 6, 2004 p30.

Cover

The PlayStation 2 Greatest Hits budget release of the game confusingly uses the cover art of the 2010 game Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands.

Farah

Curious about how Farah feels about the Prince? Use the free-look button to look at her during the game to see how their relationship grows.

Murals

On the opening level, just after the room in which you first see the sands of time / giant hourglass, you find a water-filled passage that has 6 murals on the walls. The contents of the murals seem to describe the legendary history of the sands of time :

1) A blue god and winged goddess cradle the earth

2) A red demon kills the blue god as he sleeps

3) The red demon stalks the earth, eating humans

4) The blue god returns from the dead and strikes down the red demon with lightning

5) The blue god collects the sand from the red demon and pours it into an hourglass

6) The blue demon grow four arms - 2 sport the hourglass - 2 carry a sword and the severed head of the red demon. Humans worship at his feet.

Hidden games

The Playstation 2 and Gamecube versions feature a hidden version of the original Prince of Persia , which once unlocked can be played at will.

The X-Box version of the game features the first Prince of Persia, but also features a hidden Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow & The Flame, which will also show up as unlocked content.

The Windows version of the game does not feature either game hidden anywhere.

Rustam

Several times the main characters mention the "legendary" Rustam in comparison to what the Prince is able to do. Rustam was a Persian hero noted for his great strength. Born with prematurely gray hair, Rustam slew a rampaging white elephant with a single blow at the age of ten.

More at "Rustam." Encyclopedia Mythica. 2004. Encyclopedia Mythica Online.

Awards

  • 4Players
    • 2003 – Best Console Graphics of the Year (PlayStation 2)
  • Computer Games Magazine
    • March 2004 - #7 Game of the Year 2003
  • Computer Gaming World
    • March 2004 (Issue #236) – Action Game of the Year
    • March 2004 (Issue #236) – Weapon of the Year (for the Dagger of Time)
  • EGM
    • February 2006 - #166 out of 200 of the "Greatest Games of Their Time"
  • GameSpy
    • 2003 – #10 Game of the Year (together with SoulCalibur II)
    • 2003 – #4 Xbox Game of the Year
    • 2003 – #9 GameCube Game of the Year

Information also contributed by Big John WV, PCGamer77, Rupert Breheny, Sciere and WildKard

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by quizzley7.

PlayStation 3 added by Charly2.0. PlayStation 2 added by Corn Popper. Xbox One, Xbox 360 added by Plok. Windows added by Cyberzed. Xbox added by JPaterson.

Additional contributors: MAT, Terrence Bosky, Unicorn Lynx, Apogee IV, JRK, Johnny "ThunderPeel2001" Walker, Sciere, Simone Curti, Zeppin, Eltahriel, Patrick Bregger, FatherJack, 一旁冷笑.

Game added November 30, 2003. Last modified March 7, 2024.