Prince of Persia: Sands of Time

[PersianImmortal]

I just got this game and I have to say it is fantastic. Yes, I'm Persian so I'm a bit biased, but this is one beautiful-looking, smooth performing and incredibly fun game. I highly recommend it to people. It's been getting rave reviews, and rightly so. It is very atmospheric, with great visuals, animation and sound/music.

The recommended (not minimum) system requirements are this(!):
Win 98 SE/ME/2000/XP Only
DirectX 9.0b
1.2 GHz Pentium 4, AMD Athlon or equivalent
256 MB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 4 or ATI Radeon 9500
DirectX 8.0 compatible sound device
1.4 GB hard drive space
Windows-compatible mouse required

That means most people can play this game (except GeForce4MX owners) with reasonable eye candy at smooth fps.

Most people with newer DX9 hardware with Pixel Shader/Vertex Shader 2.0 support (e.g. Radeon 9600 Pro upwards) and a decent CPU (e.g. P41.7 or higher) should be able to run this with everything enabled and get all the fantastic effects like motion blur, reflective surfaces etc.

It always seems to save at the right points so there's no long redoing of boring parts, and the puzzles so far haven't been ridiculously difficult. I'm loving it :)

[Beefy]

Been hearing good things about this game for a while. Might have to track it down and take a look. ;)

[The__tweaker]

dito.. ^^

[PersianImmortal]

I installed this game on my old rig which I've given to my parents (P4 1.8, GeForce3, 256MB DDR) and I'm amazed to say it runs flawlessly at 1024x768x32, every setting at max (except EAX). And it looks at least 90% as good as it does on my system (P4 2.6, 9800Pro, 1MB RAM) at 1600x1200x32, everything max. I can't notice any real difference in the special effects either despite one being run in DX8 mode and the other in full DX9. Amazing accomplishment by the design team - good to see in this day and age that a console-first game is running (and looking) better on modest PCs :)

I was hoping to write a tweak guide for the game, but quite honestly there's no tricky or hidden settings as such, and it runs so well even on lower end rigs that there's no tweaking necessary at all. All the tips and descriptions you need are in the readme file that comes with the game.

[The__tweaker]

Sounds good, I hope it likes the 3.9 cats which I'm running at 1600x1200 32bit :)

[PersianImmortal]

I'm using the 3.9 Cats right now. No problems.

[FLaCo]

I also hope thats not 1MB you are running it on...:p

[PersianImmortal]

That's how good this game is, you can run it on 1MB of RAM :laugh:

No it's 1GB, but when running it on my parent's meagre 256MB it still ran smoothly so it's not a memory hungry game.

[mew]

ahh. you helped me make up my mind. i saw the trailers and they looked badass, but i was waiting for a players opinion. :D im gonna get the game now. :)

[PersianImmortal]

I'm almost about to finish it and I found it to be a great game indeed. The scenery, special effects, sounds, gameplay are all top-notch. This is not a cheap console port in the slightest - full PC textures and effects are in use. Runs smoothly on virtually any machine meeting the minimum specs with almost every setting max.

Get it, play through the first few challenges which are mediocre and the game keeps getting more and more fun and the scenery becomes prettier and prettier :)

[SearanoX]

I've heard some very nice things about this game, though apparently the console versions are superior due to the controllers. Keyboards don't suit platformers 99% of the time, but this may be an exception.

*goes out to look for demo*

[mew]

oh DO post it here if you can find a playable demo of it. i want to try it.

[SearanoX]

I've been looking, and I can't find one...

Lousy Ubi Soft...

[PersianImmortal]

I haven't head of a demo for it, but as a keyboard player of the game I can honestly say there are no control problems at all using the keyboard. I have a gamepad I could use but keyboard did me just fine :)