Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Published by Ubisoft Entertainment SA
Developed by Ubisoft Montreal Studios
Released 2003
Genre Action,Adventure

Description :

The story in this Prince of Persia game starts out as the Prince and his father, the King of Persia, are besieging the Maharajah's castle to plunder the treasures hidden inside. In order to impress his father, the Prince sneaks inside to recover the magical Dagger of Time. He quickly learns that this dagger has the ability to control time. The malevolent Vizier has other plans for the dagger, however, and tricks the Prince into unlocking a mysterious secret of the Dagger that causes the King and many of his subjects to be turned into sand zombies. Now, the Prince must figure out what has happened and try to set things right again.

The Sands of Time is a action adventure game that updates many of the gameplay concepts from the original two games and brings them into a fully 3-dimensional world. The Prince will engage in sword fighting, wall climbing, spike dodging, puzzle solving, and more in his quest. The Prince also carries the Dagger of Time, which allows him to unleash several magical powers. The most important of these powers is the ability to reverse time. This ability allows the player to reverse their actions when they lead the Prince to his death.

Requirements :

Min.CPU PIII
Min.OS Win98SE
Min.RAM 256MB
Min.DirectX 9.0b
CDROM Speed 16X
Keyboard
Mouse
Offline Players 1

Notes : (For Better Performance)

• Processor : 800Mhz Pentium III or AMD Athlon.
• Graphics card - 64Mb GeForce 3 or higher (GeForce 4 MX cards are NOT supported) or ATI Radeon 8500 or higher.
• Sound Card - must be DirectX 9 compatible.
• Hard Drive Space - 1.5Gb minimum.
  

Other details

• Not recommended for use with CD-RWs.
  
• The game ONLY supports the Thrustmaster Firestorm Dual Analog 3 gamepad.
  
• Also runs in Windows 2000/ME and XP.

Trivia :

On the opening level, just after the room in which you first see the sands of time / giant hourglass, you find a water-filled passage that has 6 murals on the walls. The contents of the murals seem to describe the legendary history of the sands of time :

1) A blue god and winged goddess cradle the earth

2) A red demon kills the blue god as he sleeps

3) The red demon stalks the earth, eating humans

4) The blue god returns from the dead and strikes down the red demon with lightning

5) The blue god collects the sand from the red demon and pours it into an hourglass

6) The blue demon grow four arms - 2 sport the hourglass - 2 carry a sword and the severed head of the red demon. Humans worship at his feet.

POP:SOT uses a modified version of Beyond Good and Evil game engine.

Several times the main characters mention the "legendary" Rustam in comparison to what the Prince is able to do. Rustam was a Persian hero noted for his great strength. Born with prematurely gray hair, Rustam slew a rampaging white elephant with a single blow at the age of ten.

The Internet marketing for Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was Ubisoft's most successful campaign so far. Ad agency Digital Outlook targeted 15-24-year-old males with ads featuring characters from the game and its "acrobatic action gameplay". A DHTML overlay showing the Prince slicing through the computer screen with his sword had a click-through rate of 26.1%. A streaming video ad, showing the gameplay, had a click-through rate of 23.43%. These rates were 4x higher than the host site's average.

Cheats :

Hint: A Prisoner Seeking An Escape: Hangman:
When you reach the bottom of the chamber in the A Prisoner Seeking An Escape level, kill all the sand creatures and then enter the cell to the left when looking at the save point. In the left corner of the cell is a little joke on the wall. Take a closer look in first person view at the drawings you find there. Obviously the prisoners where playing hangman here.

Hint: A Soldiers Mess-Hall: Kill all:
When you enter this level, there will be a short intermission sequence showing you the area. When this is completed, do not draw your sword. Instead, run to the edge of the stairs and jump off. Walk into the middle and wait for all of the enemies to appear. Use the Mega-Freeze to attack the current enemies. This will also work for the enemies that respawn, if done correctly.

Hint: Courtyard: Magic Fountain:
After completing the trap corridor where you had to race to the slowly closing door, you will battle some Sand Monsters in the courtyard. After this has been successfully done, climb up the courtyard. When you are in the section where you have to climb up the ladder which appears above the spikes, continue until you find a Sand Cloud. Near the sand cloud is a hole in the wall. Climb up the rubble and run among the wall to grab on the ledge. Go through the hole to find yourself in a mystery area. Keep walking on the bridges until you reach a fountain. Drinking from this fountain will raise your life bar.

Hint: Daybreak: Avoid battles:
When the Prince and Farah attempt to cross the drawbridge you have lowered, many sand creatures will appear to battle you. Just run past them on the left and into the open doorway with the switch inside. They will not follow, and you will not have to fight them.

Hint: Defeating sand monsters:
Do a vault on any sand monster (or rebound over their head). Press [Retrieve] then [Attack] to destroy it.

Hint: Defeating birds:
To defeat the birds on ground, defend. Immediately after the bird attacks, attack yourself and it should hit them.

Hint: Defeating the soldiers at the mess hall:
Kill all of the first eight soldiers. Take their Sands except for the last one. Leave him on the floor. While he is down, run to the fountain and drink to get your health up. He will come back to life. Kill him again and drink more water before taking his Sand. Do this until you have full health, then take his Sand. You should now have enough health do defeat the next seven soldiers without dying.

Hint: Angry Farah:
Any time you are alone with Farah, take out your sword and hit her once (you might kill her). She should yell at you and shoot you with her bow.

Hint: Retrieving sand in-combat:
Vault over an enemy or rebound over their heads. Then, as you are over them, click [Attack] then immediately press [Retrieve]. This will slash the creature and immediately afterwards retrieve its sand while it is stunned. Note: This works best on the creatures that cannot block a vault-attack.