I am going to be entirely honest with you, I did not finish Prince of Persia 3D. Not because I didn’t want to, there is some good in this one that I think makes it interesting. Overall, it is just a clone of the PS1 Tomb Raider games; the controls are also better I'd say, with lots of customization options for both controller and keyboard, the graphics hit that late 1990’s Quake 2 style graphics that I personally really enjoy, and the music is pretty damn good. The level design, from what I played at least, is ok; again very reminiscent of some of the more ok levels from like Tomb Raider. The combat too is just serviceable, functionally being the same as the duals in the original duology, but in 3D with some fancy particle effects. The reason I quit, however, is because I could not get this game to run properly for the life of me.

To make a long story short, PoP 3D’s development was a dumpster fire, riddled with inner company drama and a bad case of an older developer not understanding newer design principles. For that reason, the game didn’t sell well, and has been abandoned by its current IP holder, left to rot in the annals of the internet. So, currently, the only two ways to play this game is to either get a physical copy for the Dreamcast release of the game, or try to find a pirated copy of the original online. I choose the latter, as the prior was just not an option for me. I was fine with this at the beginning, as I have a little bit of prior experience with emulating games. But, as I soon found out, this was nowhere near as simple. It took me nearly a month to finally get the file I took off of a sketchy website to finally work, something about the format of the file not being right, and not having the proper programs installed to run it; things that I just do not understand. Eventually though, I did get it to boot up, but I quickly found out that the game was just a broken mess. Firstly, the cutscenes didn’t work; secondly, the frame rate moved at a snail’s pace; and finally, the input lag was unbearable. No cutscenes is something I can work with, just look up the scenes on Youtube and you get the same effect. But a shitty framerate and input lag? That is not something that can be ignored; and let me tell you, I tried, I really tried to fix it. I went to every corner of the internet that had even the smallest info on Prince of Persia 3D, which frankly isn’t a lot of places, but nonetheless I did, and I found nothing. The one place that did have a ROM hack to fix these issues didn’t even end up working because apparently the files were not compatible with my version of the game. Hell, I even tried editing the program compatibility to run at a lower resolution and FPS to see if that would work, but all I ended up doing is just breaking the game further.

So, I have given up. This one bad game is not worth the amount of gray hairs it has given me, and I am not willing to teach myself a whole bunch of computer mumbo jumbo just to get a crappy PC game from 1999 to work on my laptop. Maybe if I had just put down the money and bought a Dreamcast, and tracked down a copy of this game for it, I would be singing a different tune, but it is just not worth the effort to play what is just a bad Tomb Raider clone. If you can somehow miraculously get this game to work, I will applaud you, but as for me? I am done trying to get this dumbass game to work. I’ll go spend my time playing something that actually works.