by Jeroen (Roenie) Zonneveld
from Netherlands | Apr 24, 2001 |
The Prince Of Persia 3D
Briefing
Ninehundred and ninety-nine days plus two is a long time to be kept in prisonment in a room, way up in some kind of tower of some kind of Sultan. Especially when her only key to survival is to tell the one responsible for her situation a new story every night. In case she doesn't succeed in coming up with a new story, she will be brutally executed. I'm sorry, perhaps I'm going a bit too fast.
1001 Arabian Nights tells the story of the legendary Queen Scheherazade. It all starts when the Sultan, Schahriar, discovers that his wife is cheating on him. The Sultan has his wife executed, but that on its own was not enough. He decided to marry a different woman every day, only to kill each and every one of them the morning after. The brave Scheherazade marries Schahriar, but not before she has very cleverly made up a plan. During the night after the wedding, she tells her sister a story while leaving the door to her room open, allowing for the Sultan to listen to it from a distance, curious as he was. But just before the end of the story, the brand new Queen stops and goes to sleep. Schahriar went mad from curiosity; how would the story end? Will the main characters survive? And what will happen to the treasure? The Sultan was left no option but to let Scheherazade live one more day, and to have her finish her story. From that day on, she had to keep telling stories for a long time, as the Sultan was only going to give up and set her free after she had told 1001 stories, one each night. '1001 Arabian Nights' is actually a collection of stories that are held together by the story of Scheherazade, 'The Prince Of Persia' is one of them.
Prince Of Persia 1:
A young traveller falls in love with the Sultan's daughter and conquers her heart. As a result of that, he attracts Jaffar's anger, for Jaffar had plans for marrying the young Princess himself, and thus come to the throne. The young man is caught, and thrown into the dungeons below the palace. Meanwhile, Jaffar keeps the Sultan's daughter in prison in a tower of the palace. The princess has been given one hour in which she is to agree to marrying Jaffar. If she resists, she will be killed. You of course wouldn't be surprised if I now told you that the young man in love who sure wouldn't mind becoming the Prine of Persia himself, is left but one thing to do: To escape, and free his dearest.
Prince Of Persia 2:
In addition to the mixture of action, adventure and the highly original, fairytale-like background story, this game had another interesting feature, which was the extremely natural-looking movement of both the Prince and the other characters in the game. The storyline, the puzzles and traps, and of course the exceptionally good looking animations were also very well-done in version 2, Prince Of Persia II:'The Shadow And The Flame', which was released in 1993. This second version was developed by the entertainment division of Broderbund Software, which later turned into Red Orb Entertainment. Red Orb made a proposition to John Mechner; to work together on making a 3rd version of Prince Of Persia, which of course had to be in 3D.
My thoughts exactly
Back then, it was the most highly advanced 2D platform-game ever. Fans just couldn't stop decapitating and piercing their at the time still flat little character, and not even the highly trained fanatics were able to come out without a few scratches. It wasn't before the poor prince had done thirty-six back-flips down every pit and had been decapitated at every possible location, that the players had enough of it. I mean, think about it, what in the whole world could be better than being a strong, handsome prince, privileged to save the gorgeous princess in a fantasy-world full of pretty belly-dancers?
Some of you might remember playing one of the earlier versions of the game. At the time, the prince was using his revolutionary rotoscoping* to move around the Sultan's - or was it Satan? - palaces, through which he seemed very 'human', natural and supple when falling down pits, slipping and sliding over banana skins and when getting cought in other Persian, brutal traps. Which brings me to the fact that Prince Of Persia 3D teases you. It will have you running, flying, diving, falling, getting back up and going on again, to the computerstore, for instance. Now seriously, the Atari version of POP-II used to take me to higher levels of frustration. Too high levels, if I'm totally honest... So high, that after a while, it annoyed me so much I relentlessly chucked the prince right out through the window, glossy disk-label and Atari personal computer included. Figuratively speaking. Not that the versions 1 and 2 of the game weren't any good. On the contrary! They were excellent, and they especially stood out because of their advanced graphics, motion, their plot, and their addiction.
The new prince managed to remain on my harddisk for a much larger amount of time than the previous version did, and not without reason. Version 2 was great, and so is version 3. It's Atmosperic, Good looking, and Challenging. If you think you possess a reasonable amount of perseverance, and think you'd enjoy Palaces, Sultans, and beautiful Princesses, go and get Prince Of Persia 3D.
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Game: Prince Of Persia 3D
Genre: Action-Adventure á la Tomb Raider
Developer: Red Orb Entertainment
Distributor: Mindscape
Release Date: Out Since September 1999
Gameplay: 80%
Graphics: 90%
Sound: 70%
Verdict: 83%
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Roenie's Controls Setup:
Move Forwards: Arrow Key Up
Move Backwards: Arrow Key Down
Turn Left: Arrow Key Left
Turn Right: Arrow Key Right
Step Left: None
Step Right: None
Sidestep Switch: Left Alt
Walk/Run: Left Shift
Crouch: NumberPad 0
Jump: Left Control
Quick Turn Around: NumberPad 2
Action: Enter
Look: NumberPad 1
Attack Left: A
Attack Right: D
Attack Center: W
Block: S
*Jordan Mechner, the author of POP-I, filmed his brother and converted the videotapes to bitmaps frame by frame using rotoscoping. Nowadays this is done using motion-capturing, which means converting movement to computer animations by putting motion-sensors on e.g. a person or animal, and having a computer analyse every move that is made, automatically. However, the designers who worked on POP-III, did nearly the same thing as Mechner did. Every single movement has been filmed and converted frame by frame, resulting in very very smooth, natural motion. |
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