How the Little Guy Moved | Hacker News Reader

How the Little Guy Moved

animationobsessive.substack.com

131 pointszdw7 comments

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This was amazing piece, thank you for posting.

His graphic novel also loiks great: https://www.jordanmechner.com/en/books/replay/

yeah i didn't know about it but will definitely check it out

I detest the 16:10 squashed screen captures. They should be in 4:3.

MEGAHIT

YIPPEEYAHOO

I still remember them. Those was the commandline parameters aa cheat codes to launch the Prince of Persia or Prince of Persia 2 game, so the gamer could use special hotkeys to cheat during gameplay.

The linked article in the OP post is a wonderful tribute to the fluid animations in this game, bravo!

That's some cool footage (gifs), thanks for sharing.

Oh, decades later, we finally learn the game was made by just one guy (and he made Karateka!), and he motion-captured his younger brother's jumps and hijinks into the sprite-based animation of the Prince of Persia game! Awesome!

I liked the Prince of Persia movie too, it was better than that Assassin's Creed movie.

I never got tired of running and sliding in these PoP games, the animations and movement felt so fluid and realistic, but I hated that gross sound when the Prince falls into a pit and impaled into those metal spokes, or when I mistimed the jump through those scary metal-saw guillotine doorways and the poor Prince is chopped into bits by those shiny gates of death, LOL.

I have played the Prince of Persia 3D games (on PC), they were tough, tedious but fun. Their "Sands of Time" mechanic was innovative indeed. And I've played the PoP 2.5D games on mobile as well, good stuff.

There are some mods (mostly retextures) for some of these old PoP games.

Ah, fun times, thanks for the nostalgia and peek at some forgotten history of gaming!

It's funny how cheat codes stick with you. I still remember "zippybobbypin" from Rescue Raiders, which, it turns out, wasn't exactly right:

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.emulators.apple2/c/JwoKZKYQ...

Yeah, it is crazy that some cheatcodes are still memorable even decades later.

I still remember the cheat codes from the RoadRash game:

k'thunk! => hit with the club thwack! => hit with the chain drip!drip! => oil And last, but not the least.. spoon! => Nitro boost!

There's later game Road Rage and Road Redemption, which are like tributes to the "bikers on death-race" mayhem we gamers fondly remember as Road Rash.

I hacked the save file using DOS DEBUG. Only a few pieces of information were stored: starting level, time left in minutes, number of wedges of life, and I think something else? I could give myself 65,535 minutes (shown in game as "TIME HAS EXPIRED!" because signed integers) and life wedges going across the screen. Made the game a cakewalk.

And yes, Prince of Persia (film) was woefully underrated. Jordan Mechner himself wrote the story, and deliberately remade The Sands of Time as an entertaining movie rather than a beat-for-beat recreation of the game. Lot of old-school swashbuckling adventure, Errol Flynn type influence. One of those tributes like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow where audiences are like "huh? I don't get it."

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