"A molested version of a wonderful game! I demand capital punishment!"

The original Prince Of Persia for the PC was a wonderful game which instantly became a golden classic and spawned numerous remakes and ports for various other consoles. Many of these were very nice (for example, the SNES-version), while others seemed to had gone through a few minor civil wars before finally being released. One of these poor new versions was the Prince Of Persia for the NES, released in 1993 when the console was nearly extinct, the SNES had ruled the land for many years and the new generation with the PlayStation was approaching. Not surprisingly, the Prince Of Persia for the NES generated no money at all. Wrong place, wrong time, and worthless programming skills resulted in a horrified version of a classic.

The game follows the concept and the structure of the original. 12 levels, one hour to go. The story and concept should be well-known by now, but I'll give you a short summary just to feel safe: It takes place into the mythical and ancient Persia. The sultan is away at war, and his grand vizier Jaffar rules the land in his place, turning the place land into a corrupt cruel regime. Jaffar wants to claim the throne for his own, so he plans to marry the sultan's daughter. The only thing keeping his success away is a young man from an unknown country, who has caught the princess eye. Furious, Jaffar throws the young lad in the deep dungeons of the castle, and gives the princess an ultimatum: Marry me or die. He gives her one hour to decide, and locks her inside the big tower, with a giant hourglass as her only company. However, what Jaffar doesn't know is that the young man has broken out of his cell in the dungeon, and is racing towards the princess. The young girl puts all her hope on the brave prince, as she sees the sand slowly decrease.

You play as the brave prince, whose objective is to pass all obstacles and guards, and free the princess who is locked in the tower, before the time has run out. The objective is to find the exit on each level, and you do this by exploring the area and solving puzzles with locked doors as well as doing platform jumping and running over holes and traps. Whenever you run into an enemy, you engage him in a swordfight. And as you keep on fighting, the time ticks down.

Almost everything that significants the lovely original have been thrashed in this worthless version. It feels like the honoured and adorable game has been stripped of all its clothes, beaten and humiliated, and then tossed up on stage trying to perform something solid and well-made when it is nearly dying of bloodloss. First of all, the fluent control of the original is nowhere to be seen. The prince moves like he is underwater. All the jumps, careful stepping passages and running moves are stiff and unprecise, and performing a simple task such as jumping over a ravine is very difficult due to the clumsy game engine and the poor responsiveness of the controls. The swordfights are even worse. Timing your blows and your dodging to match the guards' sweeps is almost impossible. The game has a weird way of calculating hits or misses during the fight, and you will often end up striking your opponent without any effect, while you will get hit even though you dodge his hit. The tactical move of switching sides with the guards to be able to push them down into a hole is now gone, and in fact, even moving at all during the fight proves to be difficult. You just have to mash some buttons and hope you will come out lucky.

If you have played the original, you will notice that there are many things missing when playing through the game. Lots of puzzles and small events during the game have been taken out, making the levels become ridiculously easy (but the poor controls still make it a difficult trip). Often when you expect to find a loose brick and a crusher, you find only an empty room. Now what is this? Besides, a very important move has been taken out, which makes the exploration a whole lot more dangerous. The prince can no longer do short jumps forward when he squats, which makes it a lot harder to pass through closing doors. Totally insane.

Not only is the gameplay terrible, the actual mechanisms of the game also show their ugly face. The framerate is horrible, and because of the poor conversion of the game, one "room screen" of the original doesn't fit into one NES-screen, which means that the game uses scrolling for just a few inches per room. This sometimes makes jumps difficult to time. Instead of the brilliant save feature of the original, we get an ugly password system which seems to have been designed by a person with a taste for a challenge in the style of Egyptian decryption. What were you thinking!? The first Zelda game introduced battery memory save functions already in 1986!

Prince Of Persia for the NES is poorly converted, lacks several important details and has controls and a framerate dipped in glue. If I must mention some positive aspects, it has to be that this version has music playing on the levels, which actually is quite acceptable. Also, the sounds the Prince's feet make when he runs through the corridors is nicely put. But other than that, the NES-version is truly a worthless effort. The only reason it gets a score of 5 of 10 is because of the powerful concept and atmosphere of the Prince Of Persia-world. If this had been an original product, without the cool Persian theme and the level designs, one could only dream of how low this game would drop on the scale. I will not recommend this game to anyone, as those interested in Prince Of Persia definitely should play the original to the PC, or one of the better remakes for the other consoles.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 05/20/06