The Sega Master System port of Jordan Mechner‘s classic Prince of Persia was published by Domark in 1992. And in truth: it’s a bit hit and miss.

It looks alright, but the main character’s movement isn’t up to scratch, which is sacrilege.

The main problem I have with it is the length of the jumps. Standing jumps seem to be way too long, causing all kinds of problems when precision is required (like, all the time). Running jumps seem off-timed, and again: seem way too long. The main character’s ‘careful’ step is too slow too. It just doesn’t feel right…

I recently read the notes that Jordan Mechner had written when he made the original Apple II Prince of Persia source code available on Github. In the notes he said that he had prepared the source code, and all the associated notes and files in it, for the teams who would be porting Prince of Persia to other systems back in the early 1990s. Well, the programmer of the Sega Master System version obviously didn’t pay much attention to them (ie. the fundamentals of what makes PoP a good game) and as a result this is a flawed conversion.

It looks like Prince of Persia, and it plays a bit like it should, but it unfortunately isn’t really up to scratch and is overshadowed by other conversions.

More: Prince of Persia on Wikipedia