Prince of Persia (Amiga)

Review

Prince of Persia revolutionized what could be expected for animation quality in games, and set a high bar for storytelling that's tightly integrated with the gameplay. The punishing counter-focused swordplay is cool, once you get the hang of it, and even the slightly weird tile-based movement feels good when you learn to decode it.

The game is fiendishly hard, and will make you start over several times in order to beat the cruel time limit. Starting over will gradually build knowledge of the 12 levels and improve your acrobatic and fencing skills. I wish the time limit wasn't there, but I'm also aware of the expectations of games of this era, short games with a reasonable difficulty got lower scores than unreasonably hard ones.

The sound effects are fantastic, perfectly mixed for the environment with baked-in reverb, and they communicate the game state very well. However, a weird limitation is that the game seems to only be able to play one sound effect at a time. I'm thinking this could be a lowest common denominator for all the platforms the game was released for, but it's a shame, when the Amiga has 4 perfectly good sample channels that could be used without any overhead.

Speaking of limitations, the game suffers from slowdown when there are many animated objects on screen. This seems like a purposeful limitation, but it does detract from the experience because the game feels sluggish at times.

Apart from the performance issue, this is a wonderful game, truly a classic.