Prince of Persia

The Good
When you start up the game you’ll be amazed by the rich colours, especially if you grew up with earlier ports. Intensive care has been put into the new graphics with textured backgrounds, foregrounds, props and animated objects in both the dungeon and palace levels. This game doesn’t just add a splash of colour, but adds to presentation. The NTSC version has text telling the story, but the PAL version has numerous dark cutscenes. The game over screen is pretty chilling. Pity that the boxart doesn’t resemble what you see in-game, but it looks okay. Finally the level music tracks blend well with the deadly atmosphere and are faithful to Francis Mechner‘s composition, though they are only in the PAL version.

Gameplay for the most part is faithful to the DOS port, apart from the sword fighting. In this PAL version, you get four extra challenging levels. If you’re used to puzzles in Prince of Persia 2, then these levels will be a real treat for you. Of course if you’re not up to the challenges you can enter a password to skip levels. Other extras include new exclusive types of potions with incredible effects.

The Bad
You might be awestruck by the brilliantly coloured and painted makeover, but careful attention to detail wasn't really applied everywhere. The guards are all the same colour, just like the Atari ST and Amstrad CPC versions. And for the Prince's shadow, the artists lazily did a recoloured palette of the prince and nothing that even resembles a shadow. The potions are coloured in such a way that you can’t tell exactly what they do, so you might accidentally poison the prince, though you can memorise the good and bad potions since they stay the same every new game.

The way that the controls work are partly broken for a couple of reasons. One of them is the slow, clunky movement, which feels almost a second late to pressing the D-pad. As a result you can't really mimic the glitchy tricks and moves that you could in the DOS version. At least you can jump past guards if you time your jumps correctly. Running through spikes only works if you're in the middle of the spikes and not running from the edge of them. The other major problem is the combat system. You don't parry using the up direction, but with the jump button, and it's completely useless, because when your parrying is hit, you sail back a bit so you don't get within a striking distance. Instead you have to carefully time your sword blows so that you accurately hit your opponent and hope that you don't get stabbed first. Finally the crouch ability is useless, as it doesn't let you crawl anywhere, you just squat down idly on the ground. What a waste of controls that only do half the functions!

The Bottom Line
The Megadrive version certainly took many steps up from its US Genesis counterpart with impressive added visuals and extra levels. But extravagant graphical makeovers alone are not enough to make a perfectly playable game. While there is added challenge for the hardcore platformer players, it's not going to work in their favour. If the problems with the controls could be fixed and the graphics tweaked a little bit more here and there, I would give this one high praise next to the SNES version. I'm not disappointed, but I'm not content. This title is deserving of being tried and played through, but it will take more time than the limited time before you can get used to the way it works. Similarly to Data East’s SMS port of Captain Silver the European release gets more features and longer gameplay than the US release. Go for PAL if you want to enjoy the full experience of the game. Shame we don’t get to see the Genesis/Megadrive features in POP mods.