#35: Prince of Persia (Brøderbund, Amiga, 1990)

The Prince of Persia is a rather scruffy looking youth who leaps around desperately, limbs flailing, and the sound heard most in Prince of Persia is the grunts and groans of the Prince as he strains his way through another exhausting climb. When the Prince dies, the game seems to take a perverse glee in lingering on the image of his broken and mutilated body impaled on spikes or sliced in half by chomping metal teeth. When you are told that you have but an hour to achieve completion, it feels less like an arbitrarily imposed time limit before the villain’s dastardly plans come to fruition and more like an acknowledgement that there is only so much punishment that the human body can physically take.