Virtually Overlooked: Prince of Persia
It's actually kind of insulting that we don't have a version of the classic Prince of Persia on the Wii. Ubisoft, who currently holds the rights to the series, went so far as to (hire Gameloft to) produce a high-definition 3D remake of the game for Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network, and we have nothing.
There are at least five separate versions of the original Prince of Persia available on systems that the Virtual Console supports -- although there's probably a matter of permission from the original publishers and developers of those versions. We know that Ubisoft isn't against porting Prince of Persia games to the Wii, since one hundred percent of the currently available PoP games on the system are ports.
There are versions of PoP for the NES, Sega Master System, PC Engine SUPER CD-Rom, Genesis, and SNES -- just to name the VC systems on which Prince of Persia appeared. They're all basically the same, with the expected cosmetic differences. Except for the SNES version, that is, which adds new levels on top of the original game.
PC Engine version
The original Prince of Persia is a side-scrolling platformer in which the player, as the title character, has one hour to escape from a dungeon and rescue a princess from the evil vizier who plans to marry her and take control of Persia. Between the Prince and his goal is a winding dungeon full of spike traps, crumbling floors, near-impossible jumps, climbs, guards. To aid in his journey, he has ... a sword he found on a dead guy, and some health potions that look identical to bottles of poison hidden around the dungeon. Awesome.
The hand-drawn, rotoscoped animation (based on video footage of creator Jordan Mechner's brother) remains some of the best in the history of gaming. In my opinion, the completely realistic movements of the Prince, even in the early Apple II and NES versions, are more impressive than the motion-captured movements in the later Prince of Persia 3D games. All the sprite work in these versions, no matter how many times it was redrawn (which it was for pretty much every port), somehow retains this wonderful animation.
These animations are important to a game in which the character has such a variety of possible movements. Far beyond the basic run/jump platformer, Prince of Persia forces you to run, tiptoe, jump, climb, hang, and draw your sword for fencing-style combat.
I don't know why Prince of Persia, which was really popular, didn't set off an explosion of technical platformers. A platform game based on skill and accuracy, rather than just exploration, is rare -- which is part of why N and N+ are so wonderful.
Virtually Overlooked is a weekly feature that spotlights games that aren't yet on the Virtual Console, but should be. Want more Virtually Overlooked? Check out the first year!
