It's a tall order, and last night's run was made even taller by a series of unfortunate technical difficulties. It's an impressive maneuver, and speedrunning Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time requires that you pull it off dozens of times. The video above shows Usher demonstrating what the zips look like during his Summer Games Done Quick 2015 attempt. Using those zips, a runner can break the sequence of the game, skipping battles, cutscenes and entire levels in the process.Įleven minutes into the run, the game crashed. Upon using the game's time-rewinding dagger, those steps transfer their total momentum to the action that preceded them, allowing the Prince to "zip" forward through walls or upward through ceilings. The exploit works like this: The player executes an action (usually a jump or lunging attack), and then a series of canceled steps. That's because of a new exploit discovered in February, which has allowed runners to shave about one hour off of the game's former world record time - a colossal improvement that the game's runners have been practicing since its discovery. Though Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time has been around for nearly 12 years, there's been a lot of activity in the game's speedrunning community for the past few months. Prince of Persia also influenced a sub-genre, which imitated the sprawling non-scrolling levels, fluid animation, and control style pioneered by Prince.At midnight last night, a speedrunner by the name of Joe "Henneko_" Usher kicked off a run of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time that was expected to last a breezy 80 minutes.īy 12:11, the run had gone straight to Hell. This was achieved by interspersing intelligent puzzles and deadly traps all along the path the Prince had to take to complete the game-all this packaged in fluid, life-like motion. The game managed to surprise and captivate the player despite being at first glance, repetitive. Mechner has said that when he started programming, the first ten minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark had been one of the main inspirations for the character's acrobatic responses in a dangerous environment.Īfter the original release on the Apple II, Prince of Persia was ported to a wide range of platforms, including the Amiga, Apple Macintosh, DOS, NES, Game Boy, Sega Mega Drive, Game Gear, SNES, Sharp X68000, Atari ST and SAM Coupé. Also unusual was the method of combat: protagonist and enemies fought with swords, not projectile weapons, as was the case in most contemporary games. Mechner used a process called rotoscoping, in which he studied many hours of film of his younger brother David running and jumping in white clothes, to ensure that all the movements looked just right. Prince of Persia (often shortened to "POP") is a platform game, originally developed by Jordan Mechner in 1989 for the Apple II, that was widely seen as a great leap forward in the quality of animation seen in computer games. Win the game now, as this mode is only for practice. Skips a level, but leaves you with 15 minutes of time. Turns sound ON/OFF, along with the music. Note that time will still flow, so if you keep restarting a level for one
This will only reset the current level you are on in case you get To back up your game, copy the Prince.sav file into Also note that you can only save a game at a time.
You have to be at least at Level 3 to save. Shows you the amount of time you have left. While jumping, hold Shift to catch the other ledge and hold. Hold and press Up + Left or Right to make a careful jump. Hold to hang on to ledges, walk slowly, pick up stuff, and fight. As above, Prince runs forward for a shortĭistance if button is tapped Prince runs continuously if button is held. Prince will run forward for a short distance if tapped While swordfighting this will put your sword away. Prince will crouch for as long as the button is held. While swordfighting Up is used to block an attack.
If there are some loose slabs above you, hop to touch them and they will fall. If there is a ledge above, hold up to jump and climb up the ledge.