Figures weren’t pretty at the end of 2003…
But Prince of Persia ended up being Ubi’s top selling game of the fiscal year, moving 2.4 million units!
I guess that Splinter Cell bundling thing worked some magic. Good stuff. :-)
Wow, that’s incredible. Most games live and die by their first week or two on store shelves.
I can think of no game that deserved it more…
Well, except for that lame final boss fight,
I consider the final navigation puzzles sans-rewind to have been the “final boss fight,” actually. Offhandedly executing an elderly and consumption-ridden old man was simply icing on the cake.
It’s great that the game’s legs have a financial impact.
Sands of Time was great – the time-rewind game mechanic made the stupid jumping puzzles tolerable for a change; I’ll accept it as a suitable apology for the atrocity known as Prince of Persia 3D.
- Alan
The problem is it, along with BG&E, were heavily discounted pretty soon after release - here in the UK at least. Christ, within a month, you could get both half price. It’ be interesting to know how many they actually sold at full price.
It makes an interesting argument for dropping the prices of games though.
I don’t think Sands of Time was discounted in the US. And hot damn, it was a great game–the first game worthy of the PoP name since its side-scrolling days. If nothing else, maybe those sales figures will give us a sequel.
I wish this game had a bonus mode where they time you on your ability to run through the whole game as quickly as possible. From an engineering perspective it would have been trivial to implement, you could have posted your time to an Xbox Live leaderboard, and it would have been a reason to play through an excellent but relatively short game again.
That’s where I stopped playing. Bad enough that they took away my favorite toy, but then they confront me with a long sequence that includes at least two situations that they haven’t bothered to previously train me how to cope with. I eventually managed to figure out the way to consistently deal with “being attacked while on a narrow ledge”, but after the Nth failed attempt at “wall-jumping DOWN a deep well”, I decided that I didn’t really need to see the final CS that much.
It was a great game up until that part at least…
That’s only a problem, revenue-wise, for Ubisoft. But it’s still win-win for everyone, because it primes the market for the next Prince of Persia game, which they’ve already said they’re working on.
Yes, but perhaps Ubi feels as if they lowered the price on it too quickly. Obviously word of mouth has helped sell the game, and I think they probably regret not giving it some more time at full price.
Yup, which is always the reason why games won’t just launch at a cheaper price, because enough people are willing to spend more when a game releases.
The game does have it. EGM has a article this month called Speed Freaks about people who compete in how fast they can get through games that time you. The record for PoP is 2 hrs 10 minutes.
Yes, but perhaps Ubi feels as if they lowered the price on it too quickly. Obviously word of mouth has helped sell the game, and I think they probably regret not giving it some more time at full price.
The price really hasn’t lowered. They did bundle it with Splinter Cell for a few weeks in January but, according to ebgames.com, the Xbox and GCN versions are selling for $39.99 and the PS2 version is $49.99. Its hardly been relegated to the budget rack…
The rewind mechanic was criminally underused. I actually felt sorry for owning the Xbox version because there was no infinite sand cheat.
I picked up POP at a budget game sale yesterday on the advice of … almost everyone here. Whilst it is a fantastic game I find I am constantly fighting the camera. How do you control it ? Sometimes it does obey my mouse movement and other times it doesn’t.
Fights seem to be a problem as well when I get mobbed by more than three bad guys at a time.
When it doesn’t obey your mouse commands, it’s pretty much always because it’s oriented towards something that you need to be looking at (usually a puzzle of some sort). It takes some getting used to–you just have to stop fighting it and trust that the camera usually knows best.
Fights seem to be a problem as well when I get mobbed by more than three bad guys at a time.
Don’t get mobbed. ;)
Seriously, staying alive in fights is all about mobility. If you are getting surrounded, then it’s time to pull one of those “leap over the guy’s shoulders” tricks and put some distance between you and your foes.
Yes I have noticed that. Sometimes my guy will start some sort of special combat move without me realising it. I have also had to get used to the fact that pressing W doesn’t always mean going forwards but stepping backwards in a fight.
Still it is very cool watching the fights. I am very rusty at fighting games but POP seems to be a lot more forgiving than the Mortal Kombat-type games.
I found Prince of Persia to be a very boring and repetitive game.
I loved Prince of Persia, but I would love even more a game like Prince of Persia without enemies or combat. Just you versus the environment. That’s my dream game.