This one's been a while in the making, largely because my plan for it turned out to be a little ambitious. For this video, I was determined to complete the NES version of Prince of Persia, as it's been one of my favourite games ever since I first played it in the mid-90s - on the DOS version, I can breeze through it in under twenty minutes.

Unfortunately, I was only to discover the NES version's comparative dreadfulness through playing it - it casts off the cut-scenes, responsiveness of the controls, and many key parts of the game, making me think that it must have been made by people who were a bit pressed for time. But I persisted - and the resulting experience makes it one of the parts of this experiment that, rather opposite from the jealousy of console-owning friends I had at that age, made me very glad that I grew up with the PC instead.




This is a fairly huge video, and it's been edited down from its original running time of upwards of one hour - I imagine that it's only interesting to watch the whole way through if you're familiar with the PC version of the game and can appreciate the differences as I get caught out by them. You get about seven minutes of unbroken gameplay, and then I start being a bit more liberal with my time-altering superpowers. It features:

• Twelve excruciating levels
• Four thousand retakes
• Three thousand and ninety-nine instances of me saying "Right!" overconfidently after a retake
• Even more bizarre exasperated noises (coming soon as a Best Of collection)
• Nearly melting the bleep machine
• The same eight bars of music repeated for all eternity (cut out during editing in this video - you're welcome)
• Skeletons where they shouldn't be
• Lack of other objects where there should be

Good luck. If you decide to stick with it through the whole 45 minutes, you'll need it.