This is definetly one of the greatest old-school games around.
The Princess has been kidnapped, and there is a curse that will kill her within two hours. You have to complete all of the games levels and fight many people in order to do this.
Your one and only weapon is your trusty sword. You will have to fight melee battles with many people guarding the dungeons and palace hallways in order to accomplish this feat. The combat system sounds simple but is hard to master. You have two buttons: parry and attack. You can also counterattack, but that is hard to do. It really takes some practicing. Not only do you have to worry about hostile humans, but you also have to worry about traps that can kill you, such as collapsing ceilings, pikes in the ground, gigantic metal teeth that kills you instantly, there are a lot.
There will also be an occasional "boss" that you confront in the game. These guys are very hard compared to the other people and some cant die simply from sword blows. Such as the Skeleton, the Fat Prince, your shadow (a famous boss) as the battle against the Sultan himself, you will have to be careful.
The controls for Prince of Persia are very simple, as you only need to move, jump and attack. In fact, Prince of Persia is best played with a joystick (which I did as a kid) in order to get a good grasp of the controls easily.
The graphics are hard to rate in this game, as it is an old school game and it is hard to think of a graphic rating for such games. The graphics were nice and colourful, with nice looking building insides (such as the nicely done palace levels, which have lovely colours in my opinon). There are also nice looking characters. But many of the enemies look the same, which kind of adds repetition to your kills in a game. But that still happens nowadays, so that isn't much of a problem.
The sound is also hard to rate for the graphics same reasons. I recall there being some nice sound effects such as the fall of the ceiling and the sounds that played after you died, but it just didn't seem to be enough for mee. For that, I say that the sound was good, but not great, for its time. If there had been a wider variety of sounds, that would have been nicer.
You don't have to worry about worrying about the pricetag, as this game would be worth the money. You can play it over and over again and not get bored of it for years, which happened to me. It is a very fun and exciting game that will keep you entertained for a long time.
Prince of Persia is widely said to be one of the greatest games of all time. You can't get people wrong when you hear this, as they are right. There is a good storyline, colourful textures and its just plain fun, so it definetly deserves to be called this. This was one of my favourite games ever as a kid, and I see why I picked this game.
If you missed out on Prince of Persia, you don't know what experience you missed out on. Sure, you wouldn't be playing it now, but back then, it would have been a great game choice to burn out time. I believe this game would've made a great contribution to anyone's collection, and if you had it, you made the right choice in doing so.