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A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans

jordanmechner.com

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Re: A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans

#41
post #39

There is a post published on Jordan's blog covering this, might be easier to read (no Facebook login nag): https://www.jordanmechner.com/prince-of-persia-30th-annivers...

Thank you. If you ask me, the post's url should be changed to this. A lot of us don't have Facebook and block all FB connections.

Re: A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans

#44
post #6
post #4

Don't let it die Ubisoft, at least do a sequel for POP 2008 :)

How does POP 2008 compare to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time?

I'd say the combat (except the bosses fight) is better, since it's a series of duel, compared to the confused brawls against respawning enemies. Boss fight aren't as good and mostly too repetitive. It's easier, with no penalty for successive failures, unlike SoT where, once the sand is depleted, it's back to a checkpoint. But the difficulty of platform sequences isn't lower (I'd say even harder for some). The visual style is good, but not as good as SoT (but YMMV, of course).

Edit: Also, unlike the linearity of SoT, PoP 2008 has areas that can be tackled in any order and you can go back to any area you've previously cleared: it's kinda open-world.

Re: A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans

#45

The book he references ( https://www.amazon.com/Making-Prince-Persia-Jordan-Mechner-e... ) is a collection of journal entries he wrote while making the game. It's been about ten year since I read it, so the details are fuzzy, but it's a very raw retelling of the process of making a game basically entirely alone and before the internet. I'd strongly recommend it to anyone who writes software.

Imagine being a lone nerd before the Internet and not only being filled with self-doubt, there was no social network to assure you that "your people" were even actually out there.

My graduating class was 180 people (very cliquey, I had very few friends). Myself (and notably, a woman who is now a doctor) were the ONLY TWO people to take programming classes at my high school (late 80's) (it was Turbo Pascal on the earliest PS/2, for anyone who remembers). My exuberant cries of "THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!" when I first used modems and BBS's, fell on deaf ears. It was a very lonely time to be a tech nerd... and yet... witnessing everything that has happened firsthand has been absolutely amazing.

I gotta be honest, though... looking back, it was quite terrifying to be in that position. If ANY powers-that-be had dropped ANY hint of "Just. You. WAIT!" into my life at the time, it would have assuaged my insecurities tremendously.

Here I am on a Commodore 64 circa 1985 (?) during a summer program: https://i.imgur.com/dTCqbYe.jpg I believe I was coding sprites to make a very basic game at the time. Karateka had recently come out and it was inspiring!

Re: A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans

#46
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- The skeletons stabbing you to death in Beyond the Forbidden Forest (C64) - The entire Chiller[0] arcade game. I still sometimes have nightmares about it, and I've only ever walked by it once. They both turn my stomach just thinking about them. [0] http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/chiller/

The moment when a Wight burst in your cluster of archers in Myth, and the game voice just said “casualties”. The butcher in Diablo 1, filled with a room of dismembered corpses.

Thanks for that, they were awful. The alien chatter from Marathon is up there too and hearing that close by was terrifying. The rocket launcher noise offset it a bit. More recently, the Half-Life face suckers were pretty bad.

Re: A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans

#50
post #39

There is a post published on Jordan's blog covering this, might be easier to read (no Facebook login nag): https://www.jordanmechner.com/prince-of-persia-30th-annivers...

THANK YOU! I just lost a good 20 minutes reading through that blog, and I just bought the book! And ... I downloaded Karateka on my iPhone.
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