After some unlucky encounter with Prince of Persia 3D, I was skeptical with the advent that POP is going to make it as a game. To make things worse, it was released for the game consoles as well as PC computer. Remained skeptical, I got the game and pop it in. And it gets worse:

"Pixel Shader 1.1 Not Found"

I was thinking to myself, what in the world is Pixel Shader? Don't my Geforce 2 Ultra with Nvidia reference board is having it? And with all of these, I've already upgraded my driver to 56.72 and yet, the game still failed to run. Not giving up easily, I have scoured the forum to find that Pixel Shader is only available on Geforce 3 and above. Damn it!

Previously I've bought my Geforce FX 5700 256 MB but auctioned it, but it was not sold. However, my friend asked me to keep it for him as he would like to purchase that card from me. Since he won't be back soon, I decided to pop in the card and give it a test.

I start the new game and waited. The FMV showed and there was the Prince standing on the balcony looking around. Hmm, funny the way he was looking around, playing with his dagger and then does some stand up posing. Then I realized I WAS ALREADY IN THE GAME! It goes to show how good the game graphics was. If fooled me long enough.

In the beginning of the castle raid, the whole thing was practically the tutorial mode. Imagine such creative concept that immerse player into the game. After managed to retrieve the dagger, that's where the real game begins...

The game basically falls into 2 categories:

1. Puzzle solving
2. Combat

The combat section is easy but however player would have to explore the map a little in order to proceed to the next section. This usually involved in jump, wall scale, run-wall, shimmy, side-step, gymnast, etc. That’s where the puzzle solving comes in. Most of the time player would have to combine the moves in order to get to the next section.

The most interesting point in the game was the Sand Dagger. Players are able to ‘rewind’ time so that player can undo things that lead to their death. This is a great feature couple with time slow, freeze time and various other time manipulation techniques.

Anyway why are you still reading this post? Go get the game already!