Prince Of Persia Classic Combat Guide

So I downloaded Prince Of Persia Classic from XBox Live Arcade and happy bought it as I never liked POP, but POPC has fixed the stuff that used to frustrate me like how the price seems to slide everywhere, progress saving and switch markings, but for some reason I had a problem with the combat. I tried reading a few forums to see what advice people had and as it turns out I wasn't alone in my inability to win at combat and if you look at the forums you will see two clear classes of people, the first are like me, people who are having issue with even the simplest of sword fights and others not understanding what the problem is as they are doing fine.

In brief the combat works like this, you reach a screen or ledge with some guard on and the prince pulls out his sword (the prince is now in combat mode). Pressing the A button blocks attacks and the X button performs an attack. This might sound simple, but the timing of the guard's attacks always seemed to defeat me, over and over I died trying to work out what I was doing wrong, but I get it now.

Combat is kind of turn based, so let me walk you through a senario:

1. Facing eachother the guard lundges at the prince.



2. The prince blocks the guards lundge, knocking him off balance. Seeing the guard off balance the prince tries to strike the guard with his sword. Somhow the guard manages to parry the princes's strike and makes yet another lundge for the prince.



3. The prince again blocks the guard's attack, knocking the guard's sword to the side. The prince tries yet another counter attack, stabing the guard through the chest.

When you press A or X in POPC the command issued isn't imediatly carried out in the game by the prince. So imagine that when you give the prince a command to either block or attack is added to a buffer or list whitch the prince will perform at the next avalible oppertunity. This list will hold a maximum of (I believe) two items. So pressing X and then X rapidly will exsecute two attacks by the prince. So now imagine in the senario above that I have pressed A and then X quickley between sections 1 and 2. So as soon as I seen the guard start to attack I tell the prince to block and then strike. The prince will then block the oncomming attack and then counter attack. And again in the senario above I have pressed X then A in the space between sections 2 and 3 and the prince acts acordingly again.

Now as a side note on the 360 controller the Left Triger and Left Bumper will also block. As well as the Right Triger and Right Bumper will also attack. I suggest using the Bumpers as this will allow quicker exsecution of commands.

And just because I like to embed video in posts: