Re: Now that the source of "Prince of Persia" is out there...

[bloomer_au <bloomer@iprimus.com.au>]

The interesting thing about the original game is that it was built for the 8-bit Apple II in the first place. Surprisingly, at least plain old horse-power wise, the super fluidity of the rotoscoped graphics was unique to the Apple II. I think they lost that quality of the animation on every other port of the game. I was talking about this on Mechner's site (a few years ago) and I can offer the anecdote that Mechner agreed that the original graphics were the best.

The problem could be summed up by what Steve said earlier in this thread; the ports' graphics looked cartoony and less realistic. To my eyes, a really big cause of the problems was the outlines added to most of the sprites in the ports. The Apple II figures are made out of solid colors. Lots of the ports use multi-coloured backdrops and sprites with pixel-obvious outlines.

I'm not the person who would be porting or even creating graphics for a IIGS version, but I just wanted to raise this more subtle issue of the quality of the graphic animation for such a port. In the case of this game, you're not porting a game the Apple II lacked. PoP was born at full power on an even less powerful version Apple II, with the best animation the game ever demonstrated. If I had or can have any say in a IIGS port, I'd be all about trying to keep the graphics liquidy.

- Wade