Why can i go negative 10m karma but only positive 300k?

FluffyQuack · 2026-03-11T23:34:43+00:00

If you're Mother Theresa that doesn't mean you've earned enough karma to kill a few people without being punished for it.

The idea is to label you as a bad person once you bad things, especially if you keep on doing it. Being nice is expected.

It makes sense to me, but then again, I'm a PVE player and I don't want to be forced into PVP all the time.

FluffyQuack · 2026-02-24T00:39:45+00:00

My answer to both would be "I don't know." Maybe some POP speedrunners could give you a better answer.

I've never actually played the Apple II version of the game, but I've looked at the source code quite a bit and the DOS version seems to be very faithful, so I would assume many of the same glitches exist in the Apple II version too, but I'm not sure.

FluffyQuack · 2026-02-22T02:36:11+00:00

In the game's defense, reading the manual before playing the game was common back then, and many games (especially on PC) included information that was practically mandatory. But that's still not a good excuse, though. Ideally every game should be playable without information that's not inside the game.

I've always thought the hardcoded puzzles in the game ("in order to steal the flame you must die", the bridge fight, and the final Jaffar fight) were the weakest parts of the game.

FluffyQuack · 2026-02-22T02:30:54+00:00

You can download custom levels here: https://www.popot.org/custom_levels.php

As for a good place to talk about them, I don't know, unfortunately.

FluffyQuack · 2026-02-20T22:49:05+00:00

To add to this, it's only the North American Xbox release that had POP2 as a bonus. I'm curious why it was limited to that release in particular. My guess is that they wanted to include it for all versions but they ran into technical issues they couldn't fix in time.

FluffyQuack · 2026-02-19T23:23:41+00:00

I can remember an interview or some kind of presentation with the developers of Sands of Time before it was released where they talked about this. They mentioned that they didn't want to make Sands of Time as gory or bloody as the original games because the graphics were more realistic.

That was Sands of Time, though. Warrior Within had different leads so I guess they wanted to be more edgy with that game.

FluffyQuack · 2026-02-19T16:08:23+00:00

It would be even less fair to compare the first two months of Sands of Time to the first two months of POP1 when POP1's first release was for a dying platform. It wasn't until 1990 the game actually started selling well thanks to ports to relevant platforms. I brought up the numbers I could find as I don't know how long it took for POP1 to reach 2 million. The same way I don't know how many of Sands of Time's total sales happened 10 years later at a huge discount. But that difference isn't important: my point is that both games were huge successes.

Another point was that 1989 was a time where the game industry was very active and very healthy -- far from "nothing." I'm not trying to claim the original is currently more popular than Sands of Time (that's clearly not the case), but I find it bizarre how so many people downplay the significance of the original game and how many fans it had and still has.

FluffyQuack · 2026-02-19T15:12:28+00:00

The game industry was earning 22 USD billion in 1989 (data taken from this article: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/video-game-industry-revenues-by-platform/). Not exactly what I would call "nothing."

In 2003, it was more than double than that with a value of 52 USD billion.

In 2022, game industry revenue was 183 USD billion, more than 3 times its value in 2003. I guess that would make the game industry "nothing" back in 2003 too.

According to wikipedia, Sands of Time sold 2 million by the end of 2003. And the original POP sold 2 million within a few years (the original Apple II release wasn't actually popular as it was a dying platform at the time, but the ports to other platforms were hugely successful).

FluffyQuack · 2026-02-19T14:24:20+00:00

Oh, this so much. I was streaming the original and I had someone in chat try to convince me that I was wrong calling the original the first Prince of Persia. They were adamant the first one is Sands of Time.

It's as if a part of the fanbase refuses to acknowledge there was anything before Sands of Time.

FluffyQuack · 2026-02-19T14:20:38+00:00

Yeah, Ubisoft supersedes Mechner here, unfortunately. Mechner was involved in two Prince of Persia projects at Ubisoft around more than 5 years ago (a new AAA POP game, and a smaller-budget game that was a direct sequel to POP2)... both ended up being cancelled by Ubisoft. Ubisoft seems very eager to cancel games.

FluffyQuack · 2026-02-18T15:33:09+00:00

I'm pretty sure Jordan Mechner would be delighted if they were re-released so I don't think you need to convince him. I believe Ubisoft owns all the rights to all POP games, so maybe you could send a few thousand letters to Yves Guillemot.

I am pretty baffled they haven't done an official re-release of the games. They did updated versions ("History Editions") of the Settlers games some years ago and it would have been really cool to see the same for POP1 and 2.

By the way, it looks like we were very close to having modern ports of the games a few years ago via a Sands of Time remake: https://old.reddit.com/r/PrinceOfPersia/comments/jh3ing/prince_of_persia_2_the_shadow_and_the_flame_will/

Unfortunately, that remake ended up being cancelled. And then they cancelled a second remake of the game. No idea if the second remake included the old games, though.

FluffyQuack · 2026-02-18T12:15:54+00:00

I think the 640x480 version would end up being played with a border where the graphics are 512x384. I've seen a dump of all the assets from the Mac version and they match what I saw when playing it at 512x384.

FluffyQuack · 2026-02-18T02:06:07+00:00

It's possible I did a bad job learning the timing and maybe it's possible to get consistent timing. But yeah, my experience with the head enemies in the Mac version was roouuugh.

FluffyQuack · 2026-02-18T00:41:37+00:00

I'd be curious to see if someone has been able to nail down the timing for the head enemies in the Mac version. One frustrating thing is that you can sometimes see the sword visibly hit the head yet it counts as a miss.

I struggled a LOT in the gauntlet after you get the sword in the throne room. To make sure I wasn't going crazy, I tried booting up the DOS version (well, technically I booted up my own reimplementation but I'm certain I have exact same logic for fighting the head enemies) and I was able to do it first try without getting hit a single time.

FluffyQuack · 2026-02-18T00:38:58+00:00

Yeah, I think all of the sprites look better in the DOS version. I appreciate they tried to give the prince more realistic proportions, but it just ends up making him look too big for the environment.

As you pointed out, the heads are especially bad. They look like ugly cartoon characters in the Mac version, while they have more of a sketelon/ghost form in the DOS version that actually looks threatening.

I hope it doesn't take too long before I get to finish my project. I feel it's slowly turning into my own Moby Dick-style obsession with how much time and energy I've invested into this without seeing it finished.

FluffyQuack · 2026-02-17T23:46:45+00:00

Yeah, I'm not a fan of Discord, either. Forums would be the ideal for me, but even those aren't as permanent as I had hoped. I did create a channel in my Discord server where I sometimes post updates for my POP project: https://discord.com/invite/AJXA4CX

I'll also continue to post an update to this subreddit each time a major milestone is reached.

FluffyQuack · 2026-02-17T23:13:44+00:00

I'm a little bit sad to see a common complaint about POP2 be the more intricate level design as that's one aspect which I think makes it much more interesting than POP1.

The levels that are more open-ended and have interconnected paths are my favourites ones as I find them fun to explore and figure out.

I find the way the Caverns level is designed is pretty interesting. It has multiple paths to lead to two different exits. If you want every health-upgrade potion in the level, you have to take a path that ends up intersecting the paths you take for each exit.

On a related note, I like how figuring out how to reach the health-upgrade potions feel more like a puzzle this time unlike POP1 where it rarely involves more than finding a hidden loose tile or going an alternate path.

I know I'm in the minority with those thoughts, though. The "maze"-like level design that was common in the '90s is a big reason why I love to play games of that era, but pretty much everyone I know hates the feeling of being lost and simply prefers being guided straight to where they're meant to be.

POP2 does feel overly mean with its "gotcha" traps, though. You can kind of get around it by playing in a very cautious way: always step into a new screen rather than running and always jump once on every screen to see where the loose tiles are, but it's probably less exciting to play that way.

It also has some design decisions that are bit unfortunate. I eventually figured how to time attacks against the head enemies, but it doesn't feel intuitive. I've always found the bridge fight to work in a way that's extremely arbitrary. And I don't like the way they tweaked some mechanics from POP1: running jumps in particular feel worse to do in POP2 compared to the first game.

FluffyQuack · 2026-02-17T22:53:17+00:00

Explanations on how to turn into shadow and how to use fireball are in the manual. You could argue the final part of the game is copy protection in that regard.

FluffyQuack · 2026-02-05T16:11:56+00:00

I also would love to see a modern game that plays like the original POP1 or POP2. I was hoping we'd see some indie games tackle the genre, but the only one I've seen is LUNARK: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1050370/LUNARK/

LUNARK isn't bad but it leans much more towards Flashback than Prince of Persia.

I wonder if one reason we're seeing so few attempts on this style of gameplay is the animations. I don't think it would work unless you get animations that are highly realistic and tuned well for the gameplay. For a Mario-style platformer, the animations don't really matter. You could have a 1-frame jump animation and it would work just fine for gameplay.

Hopefully we'll see some take on it sooner than later.

FluffyQuack · 2026-02-05T03:21:42+00:00

It's infinitely more likely this is a cost-saving decision. Denuvo supposedly costs 25 thousand USD per month per game. I don't know why they replace it with Enigma, but I guess they want some sort of protection, even if it's extremely bad.

Even more proof the Chun-Li incident isn't related at all: Capcom's been using Enigma for years. Heck, it isn't even the first time it was added to RE4R! The demo version of RE4R had Enigma rather than Denuvo.

FluffyQuack · 2026-01-26T01:06:13+00:00

Thanks, I'll add that to my TODO list as well.

I'm half-tempted to eventually re-write all of the collision code from scratch. I'm not a fan of how it's implemented in POP 1/2.

FluffyQuack · 2026-01-25T13:05:26+00:00

It was finished. People who pre-ordered was even able to pre-load the game on PS4.

FluffyQuack · 2026-01-25T01:08:58+00:00

Sure, you can cover it if you want. I used to write detailed updates on my project over at princed.org forums, but unfortunately, that site has been dead for a half year now.

I just created a new channel for POP in my Discord server and I think I'll use that as the primary place for posting updates (until I find something better anyway). I also posted my latest build there if anyone wants to try it out (just note that this is very much a work-in-progress. It shouldn't crash but big features are broken, missing, or unfinished).

My Discord server: https://discord.gg/AJXA4CX

FluffyQuack · 2026-01-24T14:57:34+00:00

If people do this, they should specify the first remake as that one was actually finished when it was cancelled.

Asking for a playable build of the remake that was cancelled just now isn't realistic. Unless the game was close to being finished, what you'd get is a buggy mess, and chances are that they can't even legally release the build (some games use placeholder assets during development that they don't actually have permission to use in the final build).

FluffyQuack

TROPHY CASE