Prince Of Persia is a bit of a Holy Grail in the world of games. Starting out on the ugly old PC (yuk) and moving from there to just about every other format under the sun, it's a platform game with a difference. That difference is in the animation - rotoscoped from the actions of a Real Person, the way your character moves is more impressively realistic than, well, just about anything there's ever been. If you've never come across the game before, your jaw will drop as you watch him run, jump, crawl, climb and swing around in a breathtaking display of acrobatics that gives the game an amazingly atmospheric quality before you even really start playing it. But man cannot live by fancy animations alone, so how good a game is hiding in there beneath the gloss?

Well, it's okay...

There's a lot of it...

There's a lot of exploring and discovering stuff to do...

BUT: At the end of the day, you're going, I suspect, to be pretty disappointed with this one. Why? Here's why.

For a game that's showcasing the Mega CD, 300 quid's worth of state-of-the-art video game technology, there's nothing whatsoever in this Prince Of Persia that distinguishes it from, say, the Sega Master System version. Oh, sure, the graphics are a fraction neater (only a fraction, mind you), the sound's a deal sexier (a collection of not-especially-melodic but beautifully-executed tunes twitter away charmingly as you play), and it's got a useful front end that lets you define, amongst other things, how sensitive you want the controls to be, but all the flashy expensive hardware that you've just paid out all that money for has gone completely and utterly to waste. Sprite scaling? Rotation? Use of colossal memory space? None of that in here, guv.

You want an example of what I'm talking about? I hate to say it, but the (more sensitive readers should look away at this point) Super NES version of Prince Of Persia rips the heart out of this and dances on its grave. The features of the machine are fully exploited and a whole clutch of new levels (eight more on top of the original game's 12) are added to extend the life of a game that, with the save facility used to the full, you'll finish in next to no time. That's not to say that it's exactly easy, with a tight time limit that you'll really have to go some to stay inside if you want to rescue your princess babe at the end, but as with most saveable games, once you've got past a tricky section with sufficient speed once, you'll never have to do it again, and that doesn't make for games big on lastability. Looking at this, you'll wonder why it couldn't have been done on a plain, ordinary, common-or-garden Mega Drive cart, and that's not the point at all.

Okay, okay, so it's not strictly relevant to compare a game to the same title on a different format - after all, if you've got a Mega CD, it really doesn't matter how good a game is on the SNES or Amiga or Game Boy or whatever. Since you're not going to buy it on those formats, all you need to know is how good it is on the one you ARE going to fork out your hard-earned cash for. Sadly, in this department, Mega CD Prince Of Persia is found a little wanting too. Hang on, though, I'm getting a little ahead of myself. I can hear the voices of a thousand readers, and they're all saying 'But what's it all about, anyway?'. Here's what.

Right, the plot. You're a guy (a prince, as it happens). You've got a babe (a princess, logically). There's a bad guy (evil sultan type. Boo, hiss, etc). The bad guy nicks your babe, on account of her unfeasible gorgeousness, and decrees that he's going to marry her. Being a rich and powerful sultan type-dude as well as an evil one, this is something which is apparently in his power despite any thoughts the princess might have on the matter, and what's more he's in a bit of a hurry. He's going to tie the knot with his reluctant paramour in just one hour's time (yep, that's one hour, sixty minutes, 3600 - count 'em! - seconds), unless you can dissuade him with the aid of your trusty sword. All fine and groovy, then, yes? Just pop up to the front door, knock three times and when Mr Nasty answers, lop his head off. Well, no. Y'see, the sultan lives in a big (no, really, it's enormous) castle, and before you can drop in for tea, you're going to have to navigate your way through its labyrinthine passages. And kill people.

So that's enough storyline, back to the action. While Prince Of Persia gives you a far more sophisticated control system than most platform games, there's a price to pay. That price, in this particular case, is fluidity, The prince moves in fairly big steps of predetermined size (you can take little careful baby steps, but they're just as measured), which means that for the majority of the time, he's only half under your control. Once he starts to do something, all the joypad-wrenching in the world won't make him stop until he's completed the move. This in turn means that to get any kind of smooth flow to the game, you have to plan every move about a second in advance - try to jump when you're bombing along towards the edge of a platform and the bold prince will simply ignore you and plunge to his death at the bottom of some massive pit. Prat.

What this all boils down to, then, is that while Prince Of Persia is a great game to load up and make your friends go 'Woo!' for five minutes, you'll get firstly annoyed and secondly bored with it before you're halfway finished. Below the surface it's pretty thin material for a game, and although it's beautifully done, all this style-over-content stuff isn't what we really want to see from this potentially astounding bit of kit.

GRAPHICS 7

SOUND 8

GAMEPLAY 5

ADDICTION 6

A nice game to play, but not something that you'll get a lot of value for money from. And a complete waste of the capabilities of the Mega CD. A shame, really.

73%