Arab Katib That’s great, thanks for sharing all of that explanation - it doesn’t really surprise me that the normal English pronunciation is the wrong one :)
@@DavidXNewton Katib is right. It’s no wonder you hear the name Jaffar pronounced like that in Thief of Baghdad: ruclips.net/video/iLxNZCxTEW0/видео.html
I liked the barefoot version of the Prince from DOS. He seems like he can be hurt easier with no shoes and with just white clothes. Giving him shoes, a vest and a turban makes him seem more like a soldier than a prisoner. He did just get thrown down in a dungeon you know.
18:10 "Jaffar seems to have hired them from the ministry of silly walks" hahah love it And the Amiga version is best for me followed by the new C64 and and then SNES :o)
@@markpenrice6253 Oddly, C64 wasn't an official release. It was ported in recent years by @MrSid6581. I haven't played it on a real C64 since it requires some extra hardware I don't have, but it's still an impressive feat on an emulator.
*PSA:* Someone finally fixed the Genesis version, it now has a romhack with fixed sword fighting and no input lag. There's also a SNES romhack that recreates the original 12 levels.
"Because no-one can read anymore and would prefer to go on Twitter and post photos of their lunch" First video I've seen of you and I subbed right there.
@9600GTMAN Man, remember when people didn't overuse and abuse the word 'cuck'? And when people were allowed to be political because why shouldn't they be allowed to be? I 'member those days.
@9600GTMAN Politics being in a product is something I don't oppose. If they want to put politics in their product, why would I care to stop them? It's their product, not mine or yours. If it bothers someone, they just won't buy it. There's nothing more to it. Nobody with sense gets mad at the entire Punk genre of music because it's politically charged.
I really love the SNES version. It is criminally underrated considering how good it is. The music is magnificent, it's my second favorite OST behind Symphony of the Night.
Picked up the SNES version 15 years ago and only decided to play it this weekend(!). I'm absolutely floored. Sure, it's not exactly the same game, but apart from the tasteful subtlety of the original, everything is retained, while all the additions are mostly in very good taste. The graphics are amazing, and fit the gameplay, while the control scheme is perfectly replicated for the controller, which is much more pleasant to play with than a keyboard. This finale is exciting, and the challenge is quite a bit higher than the original versions, making the 120 minutes quite a tight fit the first few times I went for a full run. Another nice addition that I feel you missed it that the game allows you to go on and practice later stages after the time runs out. Or did the DOS version have that? Maybe I forgot. I LOVE the MS-DOS version, but the SNES version is a masterpiece, and I regret having held out on it for so many years. Additionally, I completely agree that among all the improvements they did, it's a little sad that they did nothing to spruce up the combat. The bosses are just guards with more health, and following a block with an attack works every single time, and so does just pushing the guard up against a wall. That even works in the final boss fight, making the finale a little silly afterall. The only actual "downside" to the port I feel is the password system saving your time, making it way too easy to cheat. They even make up for the lack of gore with a horrible torture scene in the intro.
Thanks for such a great comment :) The SNES version is definitely great, I was amazed to see a port/remake that went so far and worked so well after the lacklustre nature of many of the others!
the Challenges of the SNES Port :-D … you can Leg-it through the game , wi getting Every Secret .. & defeating most Guards on the way .. 01 hr 10 mins .. and it really duz feel ya Acomplished aLot when Completed .. its a Tricky , devious , Perilous feat Runnin' some of those LeveLz where you CANT STOP you just have2 BoLT Across to Make iT … i nearly fell off my seat while trying 2get Across! .. afew weeks and Figured it all 0ut .. and found Loads of Bits you Line-Up with EveryThing Perfectly N Fly Right Through it .. did 'bout a hundred Challengin'Runz ... never Complete in 1 go tho .. haPPy with 2 or 3 goes! … just RUN!!! .. :-S ..00P!!! - *lol , A MAD DUDE LEGGiN' iT ROUND VERY DANGEROUS ENViRONMENTS DRiNKiNG & FiGHTiNG !!!* :-D
PC/MS-Dos version of PoP has more varieties than Amiga version but that mainly thanks to more diverse graphics cards that PC could be built with, that supported by the games.
@@rashidisw Ive played both the dos version and Amiga version. Amiga version has better graphics and alot better sound. Pc version was clearly inferior.
Kurt Pedersen Not if you didn't have a sound card. Sound cards were awfully expensive back then, so when the game came out, a lot of people still had beeper speakers on their DOS based PCs
@Kurt Pedersen The Amiga version had a much better sound, using the built-in FM synthesizer. The DOS version on the other hand used PC speaker sound, although it used the noise channel very cleverly to produce better sound than what you would expect from a PC speaker. In terms of graphics, the sprites and backgrounds were technically identical but the color palette was obviously different. The controls on the Amiga were also a bit more responsive.
After scouring the Nintendo e-shops and watching other comparison videos on RUclips, I am confident that THIS is the most comprehensive for and against lexicon regarding this game. Two parts for PoP 1 and an additional for PoP 2, this helped me get a better appreciation to the game's lineage and performance, hopefully this will help me draw my own opinions based on where I approach the game from here. Excellent videos. EDIT: As I recently learned, "Microids" are still in business, and in 2020 have primarily been publishing physical release versions and ports of some digital only games, such as Asterix XXL, Super Chariot, the Switch ports of the Oddworld series, and most recently the upcoming release of Flashback 2.
To be honest, I vastly prefer the original PC version over every other. The controls are exactly as they should be, the hit-boxes are correct, the close-tiles are identified, the framerate is always buttery-smooth, and the graphics are simple enough so as not to get in the way. While the SNES version is a good game, it's not the same game. It's not so much a version of Prince of Persia as much as it is a reimagining. When I first goth this (the month of its release), it was because of the excellent Karateka. Thankfully, I was not let down.
0:33 Dos 3:20 Mac 5:12 Apple Macintosh 6:56 NES 9:04 GB 10:02 GBC 10:58 Master System 12:53 Amstrad 14:39 Atari ST 17:03 TGCD 21:02 Megadrive 24:13 Sega CD 27:48 SNES out of all of these I can only choose the NES, SNES, GB/GBC, Master System, TG16, so which one is less terrible?
You are a dedicated human being, and I loved this video.First one of yours that I've seen and you can FEEL the love you have for this game. Good job, keep it up, you got chops.
There was a version for the Sam Coupé 8 bit computer in 1990 which is one of very few proper commercial games for it. Sadly few people bought the computer so most companies ignored the machine. A bit of a cycle of apathy...
Strangely, the Sam Coupé port of Prince of Persia was made as a completely independent, unlicensed version with graphics ripped from the Amiga version. The programmer (Chris White) THEN approached the licence holders with a completed game, and it was so good that they decided to publish it.
If you think I'm going to sit here, smoke pot, and watch 35 minutes of you taking about the various releases of Prince of Persia then you are damn right.
The training mode within the Gameboy Color version only exists to justify that version of the game. As noted within the leaked developer's documents, it was actually policy for Nintendo at the time not to accept Gameboy Color versions of a game if it doesn't have at least one feature that sets it apart from its Original Gameboy counterpart (if it has one, that is).
Brilliant video, thanks mate... You can breath now ;) I know I've played a few versions but only ever owned the NES and SNES versions and I enjoyed them both.
The GBC version did fix some issues, most notably the combat actually working and the skeleton being an actual skeleton. I played the GBC and DOS versions a lot as a kid and the GBC plays noticeably different: - The DOS version moves the prince in quarter tiles, the gameboy version in full tiles. As a result you never really have to line yourself up for a jump like on PC. - An unfortunate effect of the prince not stopping at the edge of things when walking is that he doesn’t stop for chompers either, meaning you have to run/jump through them instead of walk. - A running jump in the GBC version only requires 2 tiles of acceleration. This makes some jumps a lot easier than they were on PC. - There's less momentum involved in the prince's movement in general. - All enemies share the same AI, which makes level 6 a bit pointless. I believe only Jafar is slightly different; he parries more. - Guards are stuck on their platform, they can’t fall off or be pushed off, with the skeleton being the only exception. The player can't be knocked off either. - The potion in level 5 (the one your mirror is supposed to steal) is actually obtainable in the GBC version. - The upside-down potions don’t exist. - Health potions and poison potions are indistinguishable from each other. You simply need to know which are which. - You can’t sneak up on the level 10 guard and thereby skip a huge part of the level. He always turns around, even if you tiptoe your way below him. - Passwords only save the time in minutes. If the clock says :59 after finishing level one, and you use the password you got to load up level 2 you start with exactly 59 minutes left even if level 1 actually took you 1 minute and 59 seconds. The clock works normally between levels otherwise. - Entering an incorrect password kills the prince and restarts the game.
@@everythingpony definitely not since i'm watching youtube, its just so hard to understand what he's saying because he speaks too fast. Just like james charles. Calm down 🙄
24:42 HYAAAHHAAHAA *Joker-like laughter that persists for three hours* I'd expect a shitty cosplayer wrapped in tunic-like cloth acting in front of the camera in the basement as a cutscene for Sega CD game, but THIS, OH MY GOD, this caught me off guard - it looks like a bad anime-ish art from devianart with unbelievably hilarious voice acting being the cherry on top of this cake. T-top notch commentary about the ports, by the way, and excuse me, I need to fix my uncontrollable laughter THAT induced.. hahaha..
My first real game as well, not counting 2 educational games (short anti drug adventure game, and a picking up trash and put it in the right recycling bin game).
The remake on Xbox 360, Prince of Persia Classic is really good too. It seems to be based on the Mega CD version but has some minor SFC version elements like Jaffar using his staff to attack. You can also jump back off walls both on the ground and the air to reach higher ledges and the fat guy is now a sand brute from warrior within. Another one also gets summoned by Jaffar halfway through the original fight with him, explaining why you fight him again on the balcony outside the Princess’s room. This was the first version of Prince of Persia 1 I played and I judge the other versions by its quality. Another cool thing is slamming the gate in the Dark Prince’s face in level 5 and taking the life extending potion he would have stolen. This doesn’t work in any of the 2D versions: he just clips right through the gate. The horrid and clunky frog hop while crouched is replaced with a forward roll like in the Sands of Time games which is a lot more useful and the Prince is more nimble in general, grabbing higher ledges from further away and pulling up faster. He even does a little tiptoe when walking through extended spikes. After that, there’s time attack mode for speed running and survival mode which has permadeafh. Good for challenge runs. Sword fighting is like the Apple II & DOS versions but with the chance for a small QTE to stun your opponent if you win it, like the 2008 game or more accurately, Warrior Within’s boss fights against Shadee & Kaileena. Harder guards even carry shields albeit mostly for show, explaining why they (such as the level 8 start guard) are so good at playing defence. The iOS port of POP Classic sucks however: the 3D levels are all redone in 2D as are the characters, making everything look weirdly flat compared to even the original 2D versions, sword fights & wall jumps are a lot stiffer and you can no longer do the latter in mid air. The intro text from the 360 version & all original 2D versions was replaced and now reads like a readme file and like the OG Xbox port of the Mac or JP PC (forget which ones) version of the original included as an extra in the console versions of Sands of Time, it has the credits music playing in the main menu. Thankfully no horrible password system like the Xbox port has. Survival and time attack are here too. I was lucky to beat the former in this version and still haven’t in 360. Finally, the Japanese SFC version has extra scenes in the intro showing the Prince getting dragged to his cell and tortured. My Japanese skills aren’t very good so I can’t tell if the intro and ending text was uncensored but the gameplay sadly still is: no blood for us in SFC. Boo! I highly recommend the 360 version of Classic if you don’t have it already. Grab it fast, as the Xbox 360 Marketplace shuts down early next year.
DOS: The college project made with dedication and effort. Apple II: The poor student with limitations that somehow makes a great project nonetheless. Apple ID: He makes a nice effort, albeit is somehow looked down. NES: The guy who probably made the project at last moment. Portable versions: They didn't had much to make it good, yet they at least tried. Amstrad: Good concept of a project albeit having some hiccups. Atari ST: Good project, though he tends to rush out a bit. Turbografx 16: Could use some more annotations and extra features, but it's well made. Genesis: The project looks amazing, but the student couldn't bother optimizing the proccess. Sega CD: Studies his competition and imrpoved upon the project. SNES: The student who's project is so well made it makes you wonder why hasn't been just hired already in professional projects already.
@DavidXNewton I enjoyed it so much! I can't believe I got a comment from the creator... after so many years!!! Great video, I'm going through your others, so you might see my other comments. I'm so glad I found your stuff. It's a.... very hard bit in my life right now
The Amiga version should have been shown. It's interesting that it and the DOS version share in the design, rather than the Amiga and Atari ST versions. And the it seemed the code wasn't based at all on the ST version. This all would have been good to show.
As someone who played the DOS version completly and then played the SNES, the SNES version was a breath of fresh air and turned out to be actually very enjoyable, to me the new levels and old changed levels felt right in an odd way. There was enough of both old and new that kept me glued till the end. edit: I as much as I may love the SNES version, the DOS version is still my favourite
i was seriously starting to wonder what the fuck you were talking about, when you started going on about how great the controls were. then it hit me, i've only played the NES version.
The Sega CD version pronounces the name that way in the cutscenes because they most likely took the script from the Japanese version and translated it back into English. Jafar in Japanese would be pronounced as Jafa.
@@MajkaSrajka When this game came out, anime isn't even as popular as it is now. It's just that they used the Japanese script without the context of the game in English.
I've seen the copy protection room on my old PC version as well. Waay back in the early 90s. (never had it mess up instructions though) Great video btw!
Still my favorite video on your channel. Must have watched it more than a dozen times over the years. Very informative and entertaining even with the constant need for speed. Shame you couldn't include the NEC PC-98 port here as well since you cover pretty much anything else of consequence. Especially considering it formed the basis for the TG16, SegaCD, Megadrive, Macintosh & the SNES version (made by the same developer) along with the FMTowns and Sharp X68000 versions (pretty much straight ports of it) and all that despite coming out in July 1990 just a couple of months after the DOS, Amiga and Atari ST versions, it is no doubt one of the more important ports and certainly would have deserved to be covered here along with it's many peers. ;) Anyways, thanks for making this video!
Hi, and thanks so much for the in-depth comment! Yes, I couldn't track down the NEC port even though it was the one that really kicked the game into international fame - if it formed the basis for a lot of the other ports then it makes a lot of sense that the Turbografx and SegaCD ones were so similar to each other in particular.
Weird side note: the GameGear version was literally the Master System ROM on a GG cartridge without any conversion done. You can tell because of the weird subpixel color dithering on an actual GG screen as well as a weird glitch where if you remove a Master System game from a GameGear while it's still on, the screen scales back up to 1:1 and crops off the edges; any GG game that does this is actually a Master System game without any conversion. Now I'm curious if there were other GG games like this.
That's interesting, I had no idea - I had always thought that the Game Gear and Master System formats were identical, just with the hardware scaled down!
@@DavidXNewton They're almost identical, but the GameGear added stereo panning to the PSG, expanded the color pallette to 4096, and obviously had a lower resolution as well, which is why the screen can look a little odd when playing MS titles on it. It was something I noticed way back in 1995 by accident when ripping PoP out of my GameGear, but I was never able to explain it until many years later.
Sega version is amazing: 3 additional levels, brilliant music (one of the best) and especially the final stage music gives you an idea that you are approaching sth evil. For control, you’ll get a knack of it. Graphics is neat.
Unfortunately it sounds awful and grating. Which is why anyone recording a voiceover like this should talk slower. Every listener has their own preferred speech speed, and if you find it to be too slow, you can speed it up without it sounding drunk, unlike when you slow it down. Fortunately this video is 278 years old, and the awesome author is aware of this and is doing an even better job now.
Good vid and you deserve more attention. BUT you really need to slow down your speech. You talk pretty damn fast and I seriously had to play the vid at 0.75x speed to completely understand some parts
Thank you! Yes, a few people said I was talking too fast and I've tried to tone it down in recent videos - in the Prince of Persia 2 one I tried to rein myself in a bit :)
It's one thing for someone to speak fast but lol, you really sound like your *pushing* yourself to talk fast and it feels forced and odd. Just thought I'd mention it, it takes me out of actually listening to you.
Both made by the same guy (Jordan Mechner) and both used a rotoscoping technique to trace the sprites from filmed footage. For PoP, most of the animations came from filming his little brother running around and stumbling and so forth. He basically paused the VCR, took a photograph of the TV, got the photos exposed, and used whiteout and marker over the photos to draw the silhouettes. Then scanned those in and cleaned them up digitally -- really painful process back then before digital photography and digital film.
first video of yours I've stumbled upon David. You got a few laughs out of me so I instantly subscribed. Shades of Dominik Diamond in this. Delighted to see you've been regularly pumping out videos for the last few years too, I'll be working my way through the back catalog. Smashing that like button now
I don't know why this was recommended to me. I don't know why I clicked this. I don't know why I watched the whole video . I didn't even play Prince of Persia !!!
Amazing video. The only comment I have is that your criticism of the EU Mega Drive version's music is likely due to emulation of the sound chip on the Genesis being notoriously difficult. Thanks for the content!
I saw this video loooooooong ago and I still watch it to this very day... this is the very first video I saw from you and the one I watch the most... it's just THAT addictive
Weirdly, I'm most impressed by the Apple II version, though that does have an advantage of being Mechner's "native" machine. It's got so little power and such low powered, unintuitive-to-program graphics, that getting anything to run smooth or look halfway good on it is a minor triumph. That he got it running smoothly (rather moreso than some of the ports - particularly the ST one has no excuse for jerkiness, when Karateka has larger sprites and scrolling backgrounds but and runs more consistently) and actually looking pretty decent (almost as much as the NES, anyway) at the same time as being a good game to play is nothing short of magnificent. But... no Amiga version? Is that because it would have easily beaten all the others or something so it wasn't fair? Or is it essentially a carbon copy port of the ST version? I was waiting for that to come up so the two of them could be compared against each other in a straight fight. Out of all the games that appeared on both platforms, it's amongst the crowd that's got the best chance of letting the Amiga blow the ST into the weeds - a small number of medium size, low colour sprites that could be moved with silky smoothness by the hardware, static backgrounds that could have been made extremely colourful (and would even have been suitable for EHB or HAM modes, particularly as the ST showed you only really needed 16 fixed colours anyway), only fairly light CPU load so the extra memory contention by using high colour graphics wouldn't cause severe slowdown, and a lack of music but the potential for several simultaneous medium-quality sampled SFX playing at once through the DMA... ...or they could have just taken the readymade completely CPU-driven ST code and its 16-colour graphics and done a straight lazy port, just changing the palette values and register addresses, and adding some simple SFX in place of the PSG bleeps, ending up with something that actually ran a little bit slower overall...
Mark Penrice I’m definitely astonished by the Apple II version - Jordan Mechner is an absolute prodigy, being able to squeeze all of that out of a machine that was going obsolete even in 1989. It’s so strange to me that this was almost just a hobby for him, something to do on the side when getting his filmmaking career off the ground. Oddly, the Amiga version didn’t take the chance to just port the ST version and is instead almost identical to the PC port! The only difference I could see was that it’s tuned to run slightly slower, which throws off my rhythm a bit. That’s the reason I left it out of this video, but so many people have asked that I definitely regret that now :)
@@DavidXNewton Heck, the Apple ][ wasn't even really that powerful even in its heyday, nearly 10 years earlier. Its main advantage was the expandability (like the Atari 8-bits and the PC) and having been one of the first on the scene. Performance wise it was much like the VIC20 or C64, with graphics that were sort of halfway between the two in terms of sheer resolution/colours but without any kind of acceleration whatsoever. Just a simple framebuffer like in the (pre-VGA) PC, ST or Spectrum. And often just 48k RAM. Given what most of its other titles are like (Oregon Trail et al), it's an utterly remarkable achievement. As for the Amiga, I'd expect any similarity between it and the PC version may be down to the PC version being a port of that from the Amiga (or maybe the ST?), with the bare minimum tweaks needed to adapt it to the VGA (& EGA, CGA?), maybe with a cheeky bit of improvement to the general colour gamut and so on. There was an awful lot of that about at the time. There's a certain number of contemporary games - Magic Pockets being one I saw mention of recently - which actually run the VGA in what is essentially a 16-colour EGA mode, which saves memory/bandwidth and makes pageflipping easier (as two screenbuffers can fit in a single 64k memory page), just making use of the newer board's enhanced abilities to change the colour palette from the default RGBI used in EGA lo-rez and accelerate scrolling, blitter-style sprite updating, etc. Put the two together and you can quite easily just copy over the graphics from the Amiga and/or ST version (depending on what mode the Amiga version ran in), but also smooth out the colour depth to a full 18 bits if you can be bothered. And of course Copper type effects to expand the effective colour palette whilst still keeping it technically 4bpp were quite easy because it could simply hold upto 16 individual blocks of 16 colours and switch between them with a single register write in the HBlank (as well as doing more routine single-colour updates, e.g. for "copper skies", with similar speed). Though of course as PCs got faster and more memory they went over more to full 256-colour mode, which allowed straight copying of anything the Amiga could do (except maybe HAM loading screens, but those could be converted easily enough), along with a bit of enhancement here and there if it was felt worth the effort. The Amiga one running slower than the ST would be a bit odd, that's one thing that would strongly point to it being a lazy port. When all's said and done, if you run the Amiga in 16 colour mode and don't make use of the sprites, copper or (most of the) digisound chip, it's just an STe ... but one with only 89% of the CPU power and memory bandwidth. So any direct ports that were already processing-bound on the ST will run even slower on the Amiga. Though, it running slower than the PC is more understandable, as this was around the time when affordable PCs were just starting to show greater potential than the older 16-bit kings that ran rings around them in the late 80s, with the rise of the higher clocked 386DXes, mildly accelerated VGA chipsets, larger/faster memory banks, decent-sized HDDs installed by default, DMA-capable sound cards and so-on (you need about the raw power of a 386DX/33 or maybe a 486SX/25 to pull off, entirely in software other than a little help from the VGA, what a well-programmed stock Amiga or a sublimely programmed ST manages with what is otherwise the technical equivalent of an ~8MHz 286 or 386SX). If the programmers responsible for the PC version had a shred of Mechner's talent, and more importantly if you were running it on something of that general power level or above (or its emulated equivalent), it probably would have run at a buttery smooth 70fps throughout (well, the animation is probably more like 12~15, but the screen updates would have been quantised to that frequency and probably not had even the slightest suggestion of slowdown), whereas the Amiga would have been stuck at 50 or 60Hz and probably slowed down a little here and there when there was a lot of simultaneous action on-screen.
My god, you're speaking so fast!
Didn't expect to see you here, Mr. Braxnet.
His speech craft is 101 Level! did play a lot at skyrim
Regular Scottish speech right there
You've obviously never watched Zero Punctuation
Life is short. Talk fast!
Greetings from Dubai.
@26:36 .. Actually, the pronounciation of Jafar's name in the MEGA CD version by the actors is SPOT ON!
Arab Katib That’s great, thanks for sharing all of that explanation - it doesn’t really surprise me that the normal English pronunciation is the wrong one :)
In portuguese we say it wrong too, thanks to Disney I'd guess, hahahaha
Today I learned... Thanks!
Dubai🇦🇪
@@DavidXNewton Katib is right. It’s no wonder you hear the name Jaffar pronounced like that in Thief of Baghdad: ruclips.net/video/iLxNZCxTEW0/видео.html
I liked the barefoot version of the Prince from DOS. He seems like he can be hurt easier with no shoes and with just white clothes. Giving him shoes, a vest and a turban makes him seem more like a soldier than a prisoner. He did just get thrown down in a dungeon you know.
Perfect
18:10 "Jaffar seems to have hired them from the ministry of silly walks" hahah love it
And the Amiga version is best for me followed by the new C64 and and then SNES :o)
I'm American and I lol'd at that joke!
That was awesome!
Ah, C64. I knew there was another platform that was glaring by its absence. Did it make it onto the Spectrum as well?
@@markpenrice6253 Oddly, C64 wasn't an official release. It was ported in recent years by @MrSid6581. I haven't played it on a real C64 since it requires some extra hardware I don't have, but it's still an impressive feat on an emulator.
Hiii ms mad lemon :'D
7:40 I hate it when the Klingon-button doesn't work
What happened the the Commodore Amiga and Commodore 64 versions? Well, the title does say almost everything.
carlos muniz He does mention the Amiga in the beginning of the video, I suppose that counts :P.
The C64 version was an unofficial fan remake released in 2011, perhaps he's limiting himself to official releases?
gwishart I downloaded the C64 version and then, er, totally forgot to include it
There is also now a BBC Micro version
The Amiga version is as good or better than the DOS version. Hard to think you passed on a version that would have made the #1 or #2 spots...
*PSA:* Someone finally fixed the Genesis version, it now has a romhack with fixed sword fighting and no input lag. There's also a SNES romhack that recreates the original 12 levels.
Holy man.. take a BREATH every now and then will ya?!?!?
Why, so the video could be twice as long? It worked for me!
"Because no-one can read anymore and would prefer to go on Twitter and post photos of their lunch"
First video I've seen of you and I subbed right there.
Now, in Twitter in 2019, I long for the days when people would only post photos of their lunch ;)
i did too 😊
I am a proud never-twit-er, uh, er
DOS is probably my favorite version! childhood times!
Yep, and that one was a classic one!
Click the wheel (realize max resolution is 480p lol) -> Playback speed -> 0.75
you saved me i was about to stop watching! lol
DOS and SNES are definitely the best...
@9600GTMAN Man, remember when people didn't overuse and abuse the word 'cuck'? And when people were allowed to be political because why shouldn't they be allowed to be? I 'member those days.
@9600GTMAN Politics being in a product is something I don't oppose. If they want to put politics in their product, why would I care to stop them? It's their product, not mine or yours. If it bothers someone, they just won't buy it. There's nothing more to it. Nobody with sense gets mad at the entire Punk genre of music because it's politically charged.
The version for snes is remake?
@@verhalt yes ,lot of changes ,superior version
I really love the SNES version. It is criminally underrated considering how good it is. The music is magnificent, it's my second favorite OST behind Symphony of the Night.
It's a real litmus test for any clickbait "Top 10 SNES Games of All Time" article as to whether Prince of Persia is on it.
As a Nintendo fanboy your opinion is automatically invalid and wrong.
Lot of effort put in to this. Very nice :)
Picked up the SNES version 15 years ago and only decided to play it this weekend(!).
I'm absolutely floored. Sure, it's not exactly the same game, but apart from the tasteful subtlety of the original, everything is retained, while all the additions are mostly in very good taste. The graphics are amazing, and fit the gameplay, while the control scheme is perfectly replicated for the controller, which is much more pleasant to play with than a keyboard. This finale is exciting, and the challenge is quite a bit higher than the original versions, making the 120 minutes quite a tight fit the first few times I went for a full run. Another nice addition that I feel you missed it that the game allows you to go on and practice later stages after the time runs out. Or did the DOS version have that? Maybe I forgot.
I LOVE the MS-DOS version, but the SNES version is a masterpiece, and I regret having held out on it for so many years.
Additionally, I completely agree that among all the improvements they did, it's a little sad that they did nothing to spruce up the combat. The bosses are just guards with more health, and following a block with an attack works every single time, and so does just pushing the guard up against a wall. That even works in the final boss fight, making the finale a little silly afterall. The only actual "downside" to the port I feel is the password system saving your time, making it way too easy to cheat. They even make up for the lack of gore with a horrible torture scene in the intro.
Thanks for such a great comment :) The SNES version is definitely great, I was amazed to see a port/remake that went so far and worked so well after the lacklustre nature of many of the others!
the Challenges of the SNES Port :-D … you can Leg-it through the game , wi getting Every Secret .. & defeating most Guards on the way .. 01 hr 10 mins .. and it really duz feel ya Acomplished aLot when Completed .. its a Tricky , devious , Perilous feat Runnin' some of those LeveLz where you CANT STOP you just have2 BoLT Across to Make iT … i nearly fell off my seat while trying 2get Across! .. afew weeks and Figured it all 0ut .. and found Loads of Bits you Line-Up with EveryThing Perfectly N Fly Right Through it .. did 'bout a hundred Challengin'Runz ... never Complete in 1 go tho .. haPPy with 2 or 3 goes! … just RUN!!! .. :-S ..00P!!! - *lol , A MAD DUDE LEGGiN' iT ROUND VERY DANGEROUS ENViRONMENTS DRiNKiNG & FiGHTiNG !!!* :-D
@@DavidXNewton I’d like to add to Morten’s comment about the Torture Scene in the intro; this is only seen in Japan for whatever reason.
Missed the Amiga version (which could be better than the dos version!) and though only recent the c64 version is pretty cool. Great Video!
PC/MS-Dos version of PoP has more varieties than Amiga version but that mainly thanks to more diverse graphics cards that PC could be built with, that supported by the games.
Are we sure about that? other games that were cross PC/Amiga always looked worse on PC
@@rashidisw Ive played both the dos version and Amiga version. Amiga version has better graphics and alot better sound. Pc version was clearly inferior.
Kurt Pedersen
Not if you didn't have a sound card. Sound cards were awfully expensive back then, so when the game came out, a lot of people still had beeper speakers on their DOS based PCs
@Kurt Pedersen The Amiga version had a much better sound, using the built-in FM synthesizer. The DOS version on the other hand used PC speaker sound, although it used the noise channel very cleverly to produce better sound than what you would expect from a PC speaker.
In terms of graphics, the sprites and backgrounds were technically identical but the color palette was obviously different. The controls on the Amiga were also a bit more responsive.
DOS version is the best, although I enjoyed SNES version too, as a modified game
WARNING: Spoilers for a 30 year old game!
…God I feel old now.
The sega CD ending fanfare had me genuinely laughing
They extended it because the ending was WAY too short
Great stuff here, sir. Lots of work. Your Prince skills are impressive.
After scouring the Nintendo e-shops and watching other comparison videos on RUclips, I am confident that THIS is the most comprehensive for and against lexicon regarding this game. Two parts for PoP 1 and an additional for PoP 2, this helped me get a better appreciation to the game's lineage and performance, hopefully this will help me draw my own opinions based on where I approach the game from here. Excellent videos.
EDIT: As I recently learned, "Microids" are still in business, and in 2020 have primarily been publishing physical release versions and ports of some digital only games, such as Asterix XXL, Super Chariot, the Switch ports of the Oddworld series, and most recently the upcoming release of Flashback 2.
To be honest, I vastly prefer the original PC version over every other. The controls are exactly as they should be, the hit-boxes are correct, the close-tiles are identified, the framerate is always buttery-smooth, and the graphics are simple enough so as not to get in the way. While the SNES version is a good game, it's not the same game. It's not so much a version of Prince of Persia as much as it is a reimagining.
When I first goth this (the month of its release), it was because of the excellent Karateka. Thankfully, I was not let down.
The Apple II version is the original version, but yes the DOS port is the best.
@@beatchef Yeah, I remember that now. I tend to forget about the Apple II because I hated it so much. ;)
0:33 Dos
3:20 Mac
5:12 Apple Macintosh
6:56 NES
9:04 GB
10:02 GBC
10:58 Master System
12:53 Amstrad
14:39 Atari ST
17:03 TGCD
21:02 Megadrive
24:13 Sega CD
27:48 SNES
out of all of these I can only choose the NES, SNES, GB/GBC, Master System, TG16, so which one is less terrible?
Merci
the snes version seems like it has a lot of heart and soul, like it was made by someone who loved the original and wanted to add to it
and defiantly loved Mortal Kombat so he includes freaking Goro as a boss.
I am a master of the SNES version. I can beat it without dying once.
@@metodoinstinto ok
Hello myself
@@tuxedocream lol hi
For the first time I had to use 0.75 playback speed, nice review tho
Literally did the same!
I tried it now. But then he sounds like he's a bit tippsy.
You are a dedicated human being, and I loved this video.First one of yours that I've seen and you can FEEL the love you have for this game. Good job, keep it up, you got chops.
Interesting. I played the SNES version. I was always curious about the other releases. Love it that SNES version is really a good port after all.
I really genuinely thought you were going to play the game on every drug you could get ahold of
That would've been amazing
That's exactly what I thought. On an unrelated note, I now have a new youtube series coming up. I call it "Plugged In, Drugged Out".
In theatres, 2020
Comglaturaton !!
You have just won of the internet !
Seriously though, that was clever.
I thought that *was* what this was. Isn't that why he's talking so fast?
And than Google looked upon a modernitly small RUclipsr and said, "Yes today you shall be popular. Do with this as you please."
There was a version for the Sam Coupé 8 bit computer in 1990 which is one of very few proper commercial games for it. Sadly few people bought the computer so most companies ignored the machine. A bit of a cycle of apathy...
Strangely, the Sam Coupé port of Prince of Persia was made as a completely independent, unlicensed version with graphics ripped from the Amiga version. The programmer (Chris White) THEN approached the licence holders with a completed game, and it was so good that they decided to publish it.
Reduce the video speed to x.75; you’ll thank me later. Lol
I had the copy protection version of the MS-DOS game.
My first ever game in my gaming life! Dos version and super NES the best ones easily
That SNES version is the best thing with "Prince of Persia" in the title.
If you think I'm going to sit here, smoke pot, and watch 35 minutes of you taking about the various releases of Prince of Persia then you are damn right.
The training mode within the Gameboy Color version only exists to justify that version of the game. As noted within the leaked developer's documents, it was actually policy for Nintendo at the time not to accept Gameboy Color versions of a game if it doesn't have at least one feature that sets it apart from its Original Gameboy counterpart (if it has one, that is).
Interesting! Thanks for adding that :)
Brilliant video, thanks mate... You can breath now ;)
I know I've played a few versions but only ever owned the NES and SNES versions and I enjoyed them both.
The GBC version did fix some issues, most notably the combat actually working and the skeleton being an actual skeleton.
I played the GBC and DOS versions a lot as a kid and the GBC plays noticeably different:
- The DOS version moves the prince in quarter tiles, the gameboy version in full tiles. As a result you never really have to line yourself up for a jump like on PC.
- An unfortunate effect of the prince not stopping at the edge of things when walking is that he doesn’t stop for chompers either, meaning you have to run/jump through them instead of walk.
- A running jump in the GBC version only requires 2 tiles of acceleration. This makes some jumps a lot easier than they were on PC.
- There's less momentum involved in the prince's movement in general.
- All enemies share the same AI, which makes level 6 a bit pointless. I believe only Jafar is slightly different; he parries more.
- Guards are stuck on their platform, they can’t fall off or be pushed off, with the skeleton being the only exception. The player can't be knocked off either.
- The potion in level 5 (the one your mirror is supposed to steal) is actually obtainable in the GBC version.
- The upside-down potions don’t exist.
- Health potions and poison potions are indistinguishable from each other. You simply need to know which are which.
- You can’t sneak up on the level 10 guard and thereby skip a huge part of the level. He always turns around, even if you tiptoe your way below him.
- Passwords only save the time in minutes. If the clock says :59 after finishing level one, and you use the password you got to load up level 2 you start with exactly 59 minutes left even if level 1 actually took you 1 minute and 59 seconds. The clock works normally between levels otherwise.
- Entering an incorrect password kills the prince and restarts the game.
Loved your POP and POP2 videos, subscribed ! I can see you are a real gamer at heart like me =)
Check,, ruclips.net/video/v4mXrxCe7xg/видео.html
Play this at 0.75 speed. He sounds drunk as hell.
I didn’t realize the Player Character from ZZT had a youtube channel! Subscribed!
"...prefer to go on twitter and post photographs of their lunch" XD
omg I can't stop laughing.
Now, five years later, I can only wish that people on Twitter did non-contentious things like posting pictures of their lunch :)
Cant understand what he's saying >_
0.75x speed
Are you deaf?
@@everythingpony Are you a stupid fuck ? What if it's not her native language.
@@everythingpony definitely not since i'm watching youtube, its just so hard to understand what he's saying because he speaks too fast. Just like james charles. Calm down 🙄
@@AkihabaraWasteland ic. Thank u forr explaining
24:42 HYAAAHHAAHAA *Joker-like laughter that persists for three hours*
I'd expect a shitty cosplayer wrapped in tunic-like cloth acting in front of the camera in the basement as a cutscene for Sega CD game, but THIS, OH MY GOD, this caught me off guard - it looks like a bad anime-ish art from devianart with unbelievably hilarious voice acting being the cherry on top of this cake.
T-top notch commentary about the ports, by the way, and excuse me, I need to fix my uncontrollable laughter THAT induced.. hahaha..
Heh, "Jaffer"... It proves that the cutscenes were translated from Japanese, without knowledge of the source material.
The dos version is the one I played...... its my first game ever too!!!
My first real game as well, not counting 2 educational games (short anti drug adventure game, and a picking up trash and put it in the right recycling bin game).
I want to clarify that the turban look originated on the Turbografx version, and Mechner liked it and put it on the Mac port.
The SNES version was king.
Remember being amazed by this game's realistic body movements back in the day.
The remake on Xbox 360, Prince of Persia Classic is really good too. It seems to be based on the Mega CD version but has some minor SFC version elements like Jaffar using his staff to attack. You can also jump back off walls both on the ground and the air to reach higher ledges and the fat guy is now a sand brute from warrior within. Another one also gets summoned by Jaffar halfway through the original fight with him, explaining why you fight him again on the balcony outside the Princess’s room. This was the first version of Prince of Persia 1 I played and I judge the other versions by its quality. Another cool thing is slamming the gate in the Dark Prince’s face in level 5 and taking the life extending potion he would have stolen. This doesn’t work in any of the 2D versions: he just clips right through the gate. The horrid and clunky frog hop while crouched is replaced with a forward roll like in the Sands of Time games which is a lot more useful and the Prince is more nimble in general, grabbing higher ledges from further away and pulling up faster. He even does a little tiptoe when walking through extended spikes.
After that, there’s time attack mode for speed running and survival mode which has permadeafh. Good for challenge runs. Sword fighting is like the Apple II & DOS versions but with the chance for a small QTE to stun your opponent if you win it, like the 2008 game or more accurately, Warrior Within’s boss fights against Shadee & Kaileena. Harder guards even carry shields albeit mostly for show, explaining why they (such as the level 8 start guard) are so good at playing defence.
The iOS port of POP Classic sucks however: the 3D levels are all redone in 2D as are the characters, making everything look weirdly flat compared to even the original 2D versions, sword fights & wall jumps are a lot stiffer and you can no longer do the latter in mid air. The intro text from the 360 version & all original 2D versions was replaced and now reads like a readme file and like the OG Xbox port of the Mac or JP PC (forget which ones) version of the original included as an extra in the console versions of Sands of Time, it has the credits music playing in the main menu. Thankfully no horrible password system like the Xbox port has. Survival and time attack are here too. I was lucky to beat the former in this version and still haven’t in 360.
Finally, the Japanese SFC version has extra scenes in the intro showing the Prince getting dragged to his cell and tortured. My Japanese skills aren’t very good so I can’t tell if the intro and ending text was uncensored but the gameplay sadly still is: no blood for us in SFC. Boo!
I highly recommend the 360 version of Classic if you don’t have it already. Grab it fast, as the Xbox 360 Marketplace shuts down early next year.
I absolutely adore Jaffar's boss fight in the SNES version. The way he swishes his cape as his clothes turns into armor made it so epic.
DOS: The college project made with dedication and effort.
Apple II: The poor student with limitations that somehow makes a great project nonetheless.
Apple ID: He makes a nice effort, albeit is somehow looked down.
NES: The guy who probably made the project at last moment.
Portable versions: They didn't had much to make it good, yet they at least tried.
Amstrad: Good concept of a project albeit having some hiccups.
Atari ST: Good project, though he tends to rush out a bit.
Turbografx 16: Could use some more annotations and extra features, but it's well made.
Genesis: The project looks amazing, but the student couldn't bother optimizing the proccess.
Sega CD: Studies his competition and imrpoved upon the project.
SNES: The student who's project is so well made it makes you wonder why hasn't been just hired already in professional projects already.
There are two other ports; PC-98 and Sharp X68000...
Can you talk a bit faster because I did not get it...
IWILLSEEWHATICANDOTHANKYOU
slow down! you are ruining an otherwisse very interesting video
Yes, I talked far too quickly five years ago - I’ve tried to be more conscious of it in later videos!
@@DavidXNewton i didn't realize it was that old! Apologies
8 years ago? Hopefully this commens seems old at some point. Btw you're speaking very quick and i love it
Thanks, I’m glad people still like my too-fast talking here :)
@DavidXNewton I enjoyed it so much! I can't believe I got a comment from the creator... after so many years!!!
Great video, I'm going through your others, so you might see my other comments. I'm so glad I found your stuff. It's a.... very hard bit in my life right now
The Amiga version should have been shown. It's interesting that it and the DOS version share in the design, rather than the Amiga and Atari ST versions. And the it seemed the code wasn't based at all on the ST version. This all would have been good to show.
26:39, ironically, that's the correct pronunciation for the name ''Jaffar''.
As someone who played the DOS version completly and then played the SNES, the SNES version was a breath of fresh air and turned out to be actually very enjoyable, to me the new levels and old changed levels felt right in an odd way. There was enough of both old and new that kept me glued till the end.
edit: I as much as I may love the SNES version, the DOS version is still my favourite
SNES FTW!
your "stumbling through" series is incredibly informative and well done.
I had to sub and even put notifications on. Keep it up.
Thanks! Hopefully I can start making some more of them soon :)
i was seriously starting to wonder what the fuck you were talking about, when you started going on about how great the controls were. then it hit me, i've only played the NES version.
Man, you speed-talk like two women after a date.
Boss at 30:11 feels like it's the same boss as on Pitfall the Mayan adventure
The Sega CD version pronounces the name that way in the cutscenes because they most likely took the script from the Japanese version and translated it back into English. Jafar in Japanese would be pronounced as Jafa.
damn weebs ruining everything.
@@MajkaSrajka When this game came out, anime isn't even as popular as it is now. It's just that they used the Japanese script without the context of the game in English.
I've seen the copy protection room on my old PC version as well. Waay back in the early 90s. (never had it mess up instructions though)
Great video btw!
YOU FORGOT THE SIEMEN C55 PRINCE OF PERSIA PORT!
Even I forgot that it existed and I had the C55 back then lol
I was wondering if that was coming up. I seem to remember the controls were pretty tight
Snes version of the final boss is the best version and also the most satisfying
The snes version is the best.
Mee to
yah but for an 8 bit console SMS version is just insane and with a few gameplay tricks you can easily play it... 10:59
Still my favorite video on your channel. Must have watched it more than a dozen times over the years. Very informative and entertaining even with the constant need for speed.
Shame you couldn't include the NEC PC-98 port here as well since you cover pretty much anything else of consequence. Especially considering it formed the basis for the TG16, SegaCD, Megadrive, Macintosh & the SNES version (made by the same developer) along with the FMTowns and Sharp X68000 versions (pretty much straight ports of it) and all that despite coming out in July 1990 just a couple of months after the DOS, Amiga and Atari ST versions, it is no doubt one of the more important ports and certainly would have deserved to be covered here along with it's many peers. ;)
Anyways, thanks for making this video!
Hi, and thanks so much for the in-depth comment! Yes, I couldn't track down the NEC port even though it was the one that really kicked the game into international fame - if it formed the basis for a lot of the other ports then it makes a lot of sense that the Turbografx and SegaCD ones were so similar to each other in particular.
How has youtube not recommended this video to me before?
this is great
Weird side note: the GameGear version was literally the Master System ROM on a GG cartridge without any conversion done. You can tell because of the weird subpixel color dithering on an actual GG screen as well as a weird glitch where if you remove a Master System game from a GameGear while it's still on, the screen scales back up to 1:1 and crops off the edges; any GG game that does this is actually a Master System game without any conversion. Now I'm curious if there were other GG games like this.
That's interesting, I had no idea - I had always thought that the Game Gear and Master System formats were identical, just with the hardware scaled down!
@@DavidXNewton They're almost identical, but the GameGear added stereo panning to the PSG, expanded the color pallette to 4096, and obviously had a lower resolution as well, which is why the screen can look a little odd when playing MS titles on it. It was something I noticed way back in 1995 by accident when ripping PoP out of my GameGear, but I was never able to explain it until many years later.
Damn that’s some good analogies and shit
Subscribed
My introduction to PoP was the SNES version... I am so lucky. My patience paid later with the Dark Souls series.
Sega version is amazing: 3 additional levels, brilliant music (one of the best) and especially the final stage music gives you an idea that you are approaching sth evil. For control, you’ll get a knack of it. Graphics is neat.
slow the fuck down or enable closed captions
This is a damn good video. I’m gonna watch the one about Prince of Persia 2 next!
I suscribe your Channel. Like
The Macintosh version is *the* one for me... nostalgia attack
Listening comprehension: FAILED
Excellent!! It must have taken a lot of time and effort to piece this video together.
Protip: set the video on 0.75x playback. Thank me later.
Unfortunately it sounds awful and grating. Which is why anyone recording a voiceover like this should talk slower. Every listener has their own preferred speech speed, and if you find it to be too slow, you can speed it up without it sounding drunk, unlike when you slow it down.
Fortunately this video is 278 years old, and the awesome author is aware of this and is doing an even better job now.
Good vid and you deserve more attention. BUT you really need to slow down your speech. You talk pretty damn fast and I seriously had to play the vid at 0.75x speed to completely understand some parts
Thank you! Yes, a few people said I was talking too fast and I've tried to tone it down in recent videos - in the Prince of Persia 2 one I tried to rein myself in a bit :)
It's one thing for someone to speak fast but lol, you really sound like your *pushing* yourself to talk fast and it feels forced and odd. Just thought I'd mention it, it takes me out of actually listening to you.
Yes, looking back on this I was really going too fast - in later videos I tried to be more conscious of my speed!
7:40 Does anyone else also noticed the "klingon button"
Brzeroderbund I fucking love you xD
Yeah I'm missing the Amiga 500 version here!
That's why he made a SECOND part
It was not the first game character with human-like movements. Karateka introduced the technique years before.
Both made by the same guy (Jordan Mechner) and both used a rotoscoping technique to trace the sprites from filmed footage. For PoP, most of the animations came from filming his little brother running around and stumbling and so forth. He basically paused the VCR, took a photograph of the TV, got the photos exposed, and used whiteout and marker over the photos to draw the silhouettes. Then scanned those in and cleaned them up digitally -- really painful process back then before digital photography and digital film.
I'm still waiting for the Magnavox Odyssey port to this day.
I doubt this guy is on Anything.
I loved the video, but I think you need to slow down a little bit, you talk way too fast, it made me feel like I was in a hurry lol.
THE BEST version for me is on Sega MegaDrive/Genesis
first video of yours I've stumbled upon David. You got a few laughs out of me so I instantly subscribed. Shades of Dominik Diamond in this. Delighted to see you've been regularly pumping out videos for the last few years too, I'll be working my way through the back catalog. Smashing that like button now
Thanks - and hah, how amazing to be compared to Dominik Diamond :)
DOS version is the best with Soundblaster Sound
I don't know why this was recommended to me.
I don't know why I clicked this.
I don't know why I watched the whole video .
I didn't even play Prince of Persia !!!
You should try it! It was a great childhood game.
Amazing video. The only comment I have is that your criticism of the EU Mega Drive version's music is likely due to emulation of the sound chip on the Genesis being notoriously difficult. Thanks for the content!
I saw this video loooooooong ago and I still watch it to this very day... this is the very first video I saw from you and the one I watch the most... it's just THAT addictive
And the Sharp X6000, Fujitsu FM-Towns, Sinclair ZX Spectrum ed Commodore 64 version??
this is seriously one of my favorite youtube vids out there, man what a gem, thanks so much!!!
Weirdly, I'm most impressed by the Apple II version, though that does have an advantage of being Mechner's "native" machine. It's got so little power and such low powered, unintuitive-to-program graphics, that getting anything to run smooth or look halfway good on it is a minor triumph. That he got it running smoothly (rather moreso than some of the ports - particularly the ST one has no excuse for jerkiness, when Karateka has larger sprites and scrolling backgrounds but and runs more consistently) and actually looking pretty decent (almost as much as the NES, anyway) at the same time as being a good game to play is nothing short of magnificent.
But... no Amiga version? Is that because it would have easily beaten all the others or something so it wasn't fair? Or is it essentially a carbon copy port of the ST version? I was waiting for that to come up so the two of them could be compared against each other in a straight fight. Out of all the games that appeared on both platforms, it's amongst the crowd that's got the best chance of letting the Amiga blow the ST into the weeds - a small number of medium size, low colour sprites that could be moved with silky smoothness by the hardware, static backgrounds that could have been made extremely colourful (and would even have been suitable for EHB or HAM modes, particularly as the ST showed you only really needed 16 fixed colours anyway), only fairly light CPU load so the extra memory contention by using high colour graphics wouldn't cause severe slowdown, and a lack of music but the potential for several simultaneous medium-quality sampled SFX playing at once through the DMA...
...or they could have just taken the readymade completely CPU-driven ST code and its 16-colour graphics and done a straight lazy port, just changing the palette values and register addresses, and adding some simple SFX in place of the PSG bleeps, ending up with something that actually ran a little bit slower overall...
Mark Penrice I’m definitely astonished by the Apple II version - Jordan Mechner is an absolute prodigy, being able to squeeze all of that out of a machine that was going obsolete even in 1989. It’s so strange to me that this was almost just a hobby for him, something to do on the side when getting his filmmaking career off the ground.
Oddly, the Amiga version didn’t take the chance to just port the ST version and is instead almost identical to the PC port! The only difference I could see was that it’s tuned to run slightly slower, which throws off my rhythm a bit. That’s the reason I left it out of this video, but so many people have asked that I definitely regret that now :)
@@DavidXNewton Heck, the Apple ][ wasn't even really that powerful even in its heyday, nearly 10 years earlier. Its main advantage was the expandability (like the Atari 8-bits and the PC) and having been one of the first on the scene. Performance wise it was much like the VIC20 or C64, with graphics that were sort of halfway between the two in terms of sheer resolution/colours but without any kind of acceleration whatsoever. Just a simple framebuffer like in the (pre-VGA) PC, ST or Spectrum. And often just 48k RAM. Given what most of its other titles are like (Oregon Trail et al), it's an utterly remarkable achievement.
As for the Amiga, I'd expect any similarity between it and the PC version may be down to the PC version being a port of that from the Amiga (or maybe the ST?), with the bare minimum tweaks needed to adapt it to the VGA (& EGA, CGA?), maybe with a cheeky bit of improvement to the general colour gamut and so on. There was an awful lot of that about at the time. There's a certain number of contemporary games - Magic Pockets being one I saw mention of recently - which actually run the VGA in what is essentially a 16-colour EGA mode, which saves memory/bandwidth and makes pageflipping easier (as two screenbuffers can fit in a single 64k memory page), just making use of the newer board's enhanced abilities to change the colour palette from the default RGBI used in EGA lo-rez and accelerate scrolling, blitter-style sprite updating, etc. Put the two together and you can quite easily just copy over the graphics from the Amiga and/or ST version (depending on what mode the Amiga version ran in), but also smooth out the colour depth to a full 18 bits if you can be bothered. And of course Copper type effects to expand the effective colour palette whilst still keeping it technically 4bpp were quite easy because it could simply hold upto 16 individual blocks of 16 colours and switch between them with a single register write in the HBlank (as well as doing more routine single-colour updates, e.g. for "copper skies", with similar speed).
Though of course as PCs got faster and more memory they went over more to full 256-colour mode, which allowed straight copying of anything the Amiga could do (except maybe HAM loading screens, but those could be converted easily enough), along with a bit of enhancement here and there if it was felt worth the effort.
The Amiga one running slower than the ST would be a bit odd, that's one thing that would strongly point to it being a lazy port. When all's said and done, if you run the Amiga in 16 colour mode and don't make use of the sprites, copper or (most of the) digisound chip, it's just an STe ... but one with only 89% of the CPU power and memory bandwidth. So any direct ports that were already processing-bound on the ST will run even slower on the Amiga. Though, it running slower than the PC is more understandable, as this was around the time when affordable PCs were just starting to show greater potential than the older 16-bit kings that ran rings around them in the late 80s, with the rise of the higher clocked 386DXes, mildly accelerated VGA chipsets, larger/faster memory banks, decent-sized HDDs installed by default, DMA-capable sound cards and so-on (you need about the raw power of a 386DX/33 or maybe a 486SX/25 to pull off, entirely in software other than a little help from the VGA, what a well-programmed stock Amiga or a sublimely programmed ST manages with what is otherwise the technical equivalent of an ~8MHz 286 or 386SX). If the programmers responsible for the PC version had a shred of Mechner's talent, and more importantly if you were running it on something of that general power level or above (or its emulated equivalent), it probably would have run at a buttery smooth 70fps throughout (well, the animation is probably more like 12~15, but the screen updates would have been quantised to that frequency and probably not had even the slightest suggestion of slowdown), whereas the Amiga would have been stuck at 50 or 60Hz and probably slowed down a little here and there when there was a lot of simultaneous action on-screen.
I hate seeing awesome thorough videos that have less than 10k views instead of the millions they deserve.
Thanks nonetheless for being one of those views :)