Prince of persia games for nokia 5800

There's only one small problem: Jaffar has had you arrested, stripped of your sword, and thrown into his dungeon. You have only 60 minutes to escape, save the Princess, and dethrone Jaffar.

Good luck! Strategy and fast fingers are essential if you intend to survive. ProTip: In Level One, you'll find these two flasks. The one on the left contains poison, but the one on the right revitalizes your health.

You must fight through 14 levels filled with traps and Jaffar's soldiers. Hack-n-slashers get action-packed sword fights, but making the Prince run, jump, leap, and climb to overcome lethal obstacles such as trap doors and beds of spikes are your keys to success.

The controls are very good, but mastering them is the most difficult part of this game. You must take many running jumps over deadly chasms. At first, frustration is a factor, because beginners will make a running start to jump over a pit and end up running into it, instead. Don't give up.

Prince's graphics are fit for a king. The intro screens are especially nice, and the game play screens have sharp detail.

They aren't too colorful, but, hey, you're in a dungeon! Your character's movements are extremely fluid, giving the Prince lifelike action. The sounds are solid, but they lack magic.

Here's a game that cries out for exotic mood music, but the meager tunes, although they have Middle Eastern flair, are nonexistent during game play. Audio effects, on the other hand, are clean and clear throughout, from the clack of your footsteps to the clang of steel hitting steel.

The legacy continues with excellent results. Otherwise, the two are identical in almost every way, including the most important way Prince of Persia is a royal treat. The Prince of Persia, one of gamedom's most famous heroes, has been called into service once again.

Jaffar, a vile Prime Minister, has snatched the Princess and holds her hostage in the Sultan King's palace. His sinister plot is to take over the country in the King's absence. As the Prince, you must save the Princess and vanquish Jaffar.

Prince of Persia, one of the best known game titles of all time, has made an appearance on almost every PC and video game platform.

At long last, Konami brings us the Super Nintendo version. Fans of the game will rejoice when they plug in this game, hear the first haunting strains of bewitching Middle Eastern music, and catch their first glimpse of the lonely princess awaiting rescue on the castle parapets.

This translation is a feast for the eyes, the ears, and all your other senses. It's just about the ultimate in challenge for expert gamers!

For the uninitiated, the Prince's task is to battle his way to the Princess by making his way through 20 vertically-and horizontally-scrolling, side-view castle levels. Prince of Persia veterans will recognize some of the levels, but also find some entirely new ones. The quest begins in the bowels of the castle prison, where the Prince has been locked away to rot with more than a few fellow unfortunates.

To find the door that leads to the next level, our hero makes his way through a winding labyrinth of tunnels, passageways, ledges, deadly drops, gates, spear traps, demonic pendulums, walls of flame, and other evils almost too horrible to contemplate. Alas, sinister foes and minions of the evil Jaffar also lie in wait for the Prince.

The only way to defeat any of these foes is through sword-slashing, head-to-head battle -- and a hefty dose of quick wits.

Fortunately, the Prince is agile, strong, and clever beyond compare. Unluckily for him, you're in control! The Prince's repertoire of moves is fairly large, complicated and somewhat difficult to learn. It's up to you to master the Prince's many moves and guide him through his perilous journey. The Super Nintendo version captures the animated movement that's always been a standout quality of the game. The Prince looks real as he runs, jumps, climbs, crouches, shuffles, crosses swords with enemies, and skids to a halt through the castle passageways.

Luckily for you, the Prince apparently had good Karma in another life and he's had a lot of them! Scattered here and there throughout the castle are powerful Medicines that restore his health. Of course, Jaffar has also left dangerous potions to tempt you.

Poison takes away part of your life, and the Inverter potion turns the screen upside down. Advanced and Expert gamers have the best shot at rescuing the Princess, although, Intermediate and Beginning gamers will also enjoy the game if they're not easily frustrated. Those inexperienced in the ways of the Prince should definitely seek guidance through the five levels of the Training Mode.

With everyone's stress level in mind, Konami has kindly included a password feature that enables you to access your current password at any time during the game. You can also check your best time on any given level, as well as your total time on the overall game.

To beat the game, you must finish all 20 levels in minutes. Intricate game play that challenges your wits and dexterity finish off the picture. Konami's done it again! Now get going If you've never stumbled through a few zillion attempts at Prince of Persia on either the Macintosh, or the Game Boy, your golden opportunity has just arrived.

Grand Vizier Jaffar has imposed his nasty will upon the Sultan by taking over his palace. He's also given the Sultan's daughter, your lady love, a radically harsh ultimatum -- marry him or die. Jaffar's peeved 'cause the princess is sweet on you.

So, he's tossed you into the dungeon. The prognosis isn't good. You have exactly one hour to work your way through 18 strenuous stages on your way to save the princess. The Sultan didn't spare any change when he built his dungeon. This place is the pits, literally! Each of the 18 stages is comprised of various dead-end ledgesand monstrous iron gates. Also, sword-bearing turbaned terrors are everywhere, ready and waiting to slice-'n-dice you to bits.

It only gets worse. Step on the wrong tile and its splatsville when you plummet three stories. Fall a tad short of a ledge when you make a leap towards freedom and a cushy bed of spikes will break your fall. Survive these traps and you eventually come upon the tile which activates the exit door to that stage. Fortunately, a sword, as well as a few dozen bottles of potion, have been hidden in the dungeon.

Some of the potions are restorative, others are pure poison. It pays to gamble, 'cuz you get endless continues should you lose. Graphically the game is simple, yet clear and attractive. However, it's the animation that really knocks your socks off. All movement appears so smooth and natural that you become half convinced that you really are a tiny man on your T.

However, it takes time to master the many precise moves the prince can perform. To be specific, he can jump upwards, leap forwards, squat, pull himself upwards, lower himself down, and take "baby" steps. The controls are highly sensitive -- too sensitive. It's guaranteed that you're going to panic and pull a dumb move, such as taking a flying leap when you meant to jump up. It's a tossup between what's more difficult-the obstacles or the moves. Prince of Persia is one of the more attractive, unusual, challenging, and nerve-crunching titles that's ever found a home on the NES.

If you could, would you be the Prince of Persia? Only a few dozen hours of frustration will tell. That's A Working Title, by the way, as this game is still early enough into development that you could harvest it for stem cells without God batting a celestial eyelid.

As for why you should be excited about it? Well imagine Prince of Persia crossed with Ico and Okanii, all cel-shaded and hand-drawn. Then open the gameplay up to allow for one huge, cohesive world rather than the level-based palaces of old. This isn't just Prince with a new hat on; it's an entirely new breed of Prince altogether, and one we can't wait to make run up a wall.

Inspired by such notable adventure-seekers as Sinbad, Han Solo and Aragom, the new Prince will find himself battling to restore light to ancient Persia. The new Prince can't reverse time, but his new trick will come in the form of this clawlike gauntlet Using this he can control his falls with absolute precision.

Gone are the elaborate palace interiors of old, replaced with an ancient non-linear world - probably not terribly unlike the developer's previous title, Assassin's Creed.

Rather than fighting hordes of enemies at once, the game will focus more on epic Errol Flynn-style duels against hardened enemies, making every fight count. The Prince will meet allies on his travels, who'll be important to both the story and the gameplay. Ubisoft Montreal are claiming they're focusing most of their effort on Al. Environments will vary from 'safe' areas to dark, corrupted areas. An organic corruption system means this decay will creep through the world as a living substance, challenging and interacting with the Prince.

The game will use an updated version of Assassin's Creed engine, allowing meticulously hand-sculpted animal and incredible outdoor visuals like.

Prince Of Persia has come a long way from Jordan Mechner's smoothly-animated platformer which usually ended up with the poor Arabian adventurer impaled on spikes. After the successful Sands of Time trilogy put the magic back in the Prince's carpet a few years back, Ubisoft is again reinventing POP with a brand new graphics style see Hard Cel box out , setting, enemies and a fresh hero - and this time, he has a sidekick. The new Prince of Persia begins with an ancient tale of two warring gods, one of whom - Ahriman - goes on an evil bender, spreading nastiness throughout the world in the form of a gloopy black substance called the Corruption.

The bad god's brother Ormazd manages to defeat Ahriman's goons, the Corrupted, and also imprisons his evil sibling in a sapling called the Tree of Life. Ormazd then entrusts the care of this woody prison to a race of people called the Ahuras, and for thousands of years the world sleeps safe in its giant space bed, until Ahriman begins to plan his escape. We felt this was a good opportunity to start over and have a new story arc and new characters. The new Prince is a wanderer, dressed in ragged clothing, torn from years of battles, but the luxurious material wrapped around his neck hints at a more regal past.

Ubisoft Montreal are creating a beautiful mythical Persia for the hero to explore, built from the Assassin's Creed engine - but does this mean the game is turning its back on previous Prince of Persia titles to become a more open-world gaming experience?

But our structure is more like a network, so you have nodes you can reach and in between the nodes are lines of gameplay that connect them. You have a choice of going to whatever node you want, but we're deliberately keeping the rhythm and pacing of the previous POPs. As the Corruption begins to swamp the world when Ahriman is unleashed, parts of the game will be off-limits, while others will be changed and invaded by the terrifying minions of the bad god -which is somewhat reminiscent of the structure in Nintendo's Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

As well as a new set of acrobatic moves that will help the Prince negotiate the large environments and city streets, a lethal-looking metal gauntlet has been clamped to his left hand that can be used to slide down sheer cliffs and walls to access hard-to-reach areas. We wanted a more acrobatic style, so this makes it a bit more credible, as it explains his ability to do some of the moves such as the wall-runs," continues Guyot.

The metal glove can also be used in combat to lift enemies into the air and slam them down onto the ground, as well as a few other nifty moves yet to be revealed. You can run around in the city easily, but we wanted more platform action, so you'll be controlling every jump, unlike the system in Assassin's Creed.

However, the biggest change in combat, and the game itself, is the addition of a female companion - Elika. A descendent of the Ahuras the tree people, remember and blessed with magical abilities, Elika is a constant sidekick for the Prince, a tool for the player to interact with during acrobatics, combat and puzzle-solving.

Ubisoft want to build the relationship between you and Elika, who has been inspired by such strong female roles as, arm, Queen Amidala from the Star Wars prequels and, urn, Elizabeth Swann from Pirates of the Caribbean. Go feminism! We didn't want to have too much of us just telling you the plot through watching cut scenes, so having this character with you all the time is a good way of providing stuff like backstory without stopping the action.

The focus for the combat in the new POP is on duels, rather than melees involving half-a-dozen foes wading into the action, as the development team want each fight to be significant.

The Prince knows how to fight, but we want him to feel human. In battles you have the freedom to perform certain actions - you can use your sword, your glove, acrobatics or Elika - and you can also use the environment to smash enemies up against walls and other equally vicious moves.

Each of the enemies you'll encounter have varying special magical attacks, but they'll all have the same basic global fighting system, so if they do a grab for example, you have to quickly perform a counter-grab, or they'll hurl you violently through the air.

Different monsters require the Prince to use different abilities, but new moves and other tricks will be unlocked as you progress, which will be essential if you don't want to end up being a corrupted pile of Ali Baba. Ubisoft leave taken away with one hand Splinter Cell: Conviction has been delayed until next year but given with the gauntlet-enhanced other - and most pressingly, the new Prince of Persia is already lined up for a Christmas launch.

Pie new setting, central hero, special moves and weapons, and gorgeous graphical style with smooth land-drawn animation, are all brave departures for the series that previously intoxicated gamers with its smart chasm leaping gameplay. While the full name of the game is still under wraps, Prince of Persia is definitely full of eastern promise. Saving a princess from the evil clutches of a despotic captor may not sound like the most innovative of game scenarios, but the original Prince Of Persia broke new ground in ways that could not have been apparent at the time.

As much a part of the s as big hair and pending nuclear Armageddon, platform games were firmly entrenched in the public psyche by the time the Prince showed up at the arse end of the decade. However, by adding such innovations as pressure plates, grabbing ledges and sword-fighting, along with a coherent storyline, Prince Of Persia revolutionised the genre and opened the door for a new style of gameplay.

As was commonplace back in the day. My ambition was to create a game that would be good enough to get published, and Karataka was, and had some success selling half a million copies.

Because of that, when I graduated from college, rather than look for a job as most of my classmates were doing, I thought 'Well, I'll just program another computer game and maybe that one will work too. Work began on Prince of Persia in and continued at a leisurely pace, appearing on the Apple II at the end of As Jordan says: "Those were the good days, you know, no release date, no budgets, no timetables. Just the peace and quiet to fiddle around with the game.

The industry was so different then. It certainly was, but it's also an industry that Jordan may never have entered had he been more successful in pursuing his initial dream. As he recalls, "I think I got into computer games to begin with because I was kind of a frustrated comic book artist. If computers hadn't been invented I think my life ambition would have been to be a Disney animator.

But I couldn't draw very well, so the computer, for me, first and foremost was just a great way to make a little animated story that you could play. So with Karateka and Prince Of Persia, part of the kick for me was telling a story through the game.

Jordan's cack-handedness with a pencil was Disney's loss and gaming's gain, as he set to work on Prince Of Persia. And as a filmmaker himself see 'Profile', above , it's fitting that the inspiration came from the movies.

It made a big impression on me, the whole movie, but especially the first sequence where he's running, jumping and things are chasing him and there are spikes. You know, that's so cool -wouldn't it be cod to do a game that had that kind of feel to it?

So I knew I was going to do a game with a character who could run and jump and dodge traps, but then I was just worried - OK, well what's it going to be? Egyptian pyramids? No, there's been too many of those. What hadn't been done as a computer game at that time, gdng down the list of the great touchstones of Western civilisation?

The Arabian Nights. It was this incredibly rich mother lode of stories and villains and genies and magic and it had its own particular style of architecture. One of the things I thought had made Karateka work so well was the fact that it was set in medieval Japan and had that graphic of Mount Fuji. As a player you had to bring a lot of imagination to the games you played back in those days -one picture of Mount Fuji, that's Japan!

So it needs something that's immediately identifiable so that people will bnng to it everything else that will make them believe m the story.

So, The Arabian Nights was the perfect choice. With the setting in place and the story envisaged, Jordan dwelled upon the idea of making the main character move in a realistic fashion, an area that hadn't really been explored before. Using the comparatively meagre resources of the time, and keeping it in the family - Jordan's dad provided the game's music -the expenmental animation technique initially involved a video camera and a wilting younger brother.

As Jordan explains. Albeit without the obligatory ping-pong balls attached to his extremities, this was surely the first instance of motion capture in a computer game. Jordan, however, prefers a more arcane term. Although in those days, remember, we didn't have scanners and stuff so you couldn't take the video and feed it into the Apple II.

I had to go through a number of intermediate stages. I filmed my brother on video, in fact, and popped the cassette into the VCR - which was a new technology at that time - pressed play, freeze-frame, set up a 35mm camera on a tripod and took a photograph of each frame. Frame advance, take a picture, frame advance, take a picture.

I sent the film to the Photomart. Again, we didn't have blue-screening available. Xeroxed them, shrunk them down so I got one big image with like 25 on it, and then I pointed another video camera at it. Although there was no scanner at that time, there was a British company that was manufacturing a device that let you do a single frame capture with a video camera, just black and white, no shades of grey.

So I put that Xeroxed piece of paper on an animation stand, pointed the camera at it, took a frame, digitised it in the computer and ended up with all the frames on the computer. So I just went around, captured each one. And Io and behold, to my astonishment there was this silhouette of this kid running and jumping. Disney for Snow White would film the actors and then the animators would take those frames and trace them, redraw them, change them a little bit.

So I think it's a descendent of rotoscoping. Call it what you like, the results are clearly visible when playing the game now. Whether jumping, climbing, running or skidding to a halt, despite the rudimentary graphics, the Prince's movements still look wholly convincing, a testament to Jordan's pioneering work. With 60 minutes to save the princess, the action involves negotiating a series of catacombs set in a Persian palace, riddled with such hazards as the famous spikes, upon which the Prince is regularly impaled with a satisfying splash of blood.

It was by no means an overnight hit, but this can largely be attributed to the disparate state of the gaming platforms of the time. According to Jordan. A lot of people in the games industry clearly played it, as the influences are sign-posted throughout the last decade. They were two very different games but still there was a character running, jumping, grabbing onto edges, pulling themself up.

And of course in Tomb Raider ihere were spikes and pressure plates, which was pretty cool. In the mainstream at least, it's generally Tomb Raider that takes the credit for pioneering that style of game, something that Jordan concedes. Just how good an idea that was is shown just by walking round the E3 show and seeing the number of games that are in some sense variations on Tomb Raider. A highly influential game it may have been, but Jordan didn't stop there, turning out a sequel.

A further variation on the classic gameplay, it was well received and again lifted a slew of awards, as well as shifting a hefty number of copies.

That could have been the end of the road for the Prince, but in the wake of the phenomenal success of the Tomb Raider series, work began on Prince Of Persia 3D, an attempt to regain the plaudits from its bastard offspring. Development was notionally overseen by Jordan, and the game was released in Looking back on it now.

That is. There were two problems with that. One was that Tomb Raider has already done that, and the other was that once you get over the novelty factor of being able to do all that stuff in 3D, it's just not that much fun. Tomb Raider is not that much fun if you play it now. It was fun when it was new. The press largely concurred, and following some damning reviews it disappeared without trace, a tawdry footnote to a classic game. In timeless Hollywood fashion though, the story doesn't end there, and the Prince looks set to regain his crown with the highly promising PoP: Sands Of Time, currently in the latter stages of development at Ubi Soft's Montreal studio, and a nominee for best game at this year s E3.

We've played it. Providing he can avoid those spikes. While he has a reasonable case for pioneering the whole prancing athletically around exotic lands shtick, his thunder was unceremoniously stolen by a big-titted harlot from the Home Counties.

Yet while the man on the Clapham Omnibus knows who Lara Croft is, nobody in the real world has ever heard of the Prince. You'd think he would be bitter and twisted about this, and we could be reading too much into it, but there's a bit in the game where the Prince himself, in one of his more eloquent moments, describes tomb raiding as a "glamorous reclamation of the past".

There have been several attempts to reclaim the Prince Of Persia's past over the years - ranging from the mediocre to the tolerable - of which this outing is nothing less than the very latest. Reverting to the original moniker no Sands of Time or Warrior Within gubbins it has already been described by an overpaid marketing skunk as "a re-imagining of the franchise".

Hardly a visionary statement, it's the same glib sound bite that Tim Burton wheeled out before summarily pissing in the eyes of The Planet Of The Apes. Prince Of Persia's so-called re-imagining takes place courtesy of the same graphics engine as Assassin's Creed there's even a secret skin that enables you to play as Altair from that game , however, while the huge vistas and vertiginous topology are comparable, POP is very much its own game, with a bespoke art style that would probably once have been called cel-shaded, but is now described as illustrative.

Falling somewhere between Saturday morning cartons and a fully-fledged Disney feature, whatever it's called, it's extremely impressive, throwing you into a consistent, visually stunning fantasy world that screenshots can't really do justice to. With no heads-up display or gaming baggage such as ammo counts and weapon selection, it's a bold move away from the current trend of ultrarealism, and a welcome one at that, like stepping into a fairy tale.

Perfectly suited to the subject matter, it conjures up such touchstones as the Sinbad and The Thief of Baghdad movies. And while the story of POP may not be remembered with such affection, there is one somewhere, the details of which are inevitably absolute poppycock. As a very loose synopsis, once upon a time there were two brothers who fell out, resulting in the world being a constant battle between corruption and healing, dark and light, with evil represented by oozing black pus, and good by flowers and butterflies.

As a fan of good stuff, it's your job to heal the land from corruption and reclaim the fertile grounds so that everybody lives happily ever after.

More pragmatically, to start with you're some bloke in an ornate waistcoat wandering through the desert with a donkey laden with stolen gold when you stumble across a damsel in distress. That damsel is a Princess called Elika, and doing the decent thing you save the day through what is essentially an interactive tutorial that teaches you the basics of swordplay, climbing, dropping, wall running, ceiling running and all that stuff. While there's some initial swearing, controlling the Prince soon becomes second nature, with a mouse and keyboard proving adequate for even the most athletic of moves.

However, so stringent are the paths through the game that it soon becomes apparent that you're not doing much more than pressing the right key at the right time. Clearly, we're exaggerating slightly, but it's fair to say there isn't a great deal of skill involved, as there's a distinctly binary approach to the gameplay in that you either do something or you don't.

As for the sultry Elika, once you've rescued her she follows you around like a pretty pot of glue, proving to be not so much a damsel in distress as a guardian angel, helping you out of scrapes using some fairly nifty magic.

For instance, if you attempt a jump that is too far, press E for Elika and she'll fly through the air and give you a helping hand. Further, in what is arguably one of the game's biggest deals, even if you don't ask her for help, should you be plummeting to your death she'll appear and haul you to safety in the nick of time, ensuring that at no point in the game do you ever actually die.

While it might sound like a feature that makes the game too easy, Elika's life-saving is a permanent quicksave, and is arguably an extremely elegant way of overcoming the immersion-breaking concept of saving and loading, a quandary that gaming's greatest minds have grappled with since the three lives of Space Invaders. As for the overall structure of the game, you dart about a hub-based environment fighting minions of evil and then healing the relevant area. Or more accurately, Elika heals the area while you stand by making wisecracks.

In many ways the game is more about the Princess than the alleged Prince, and she even joins in with the combat, throwing in some magic while you stick to your sword, gauntlet and an acrobatic attack. With a fixed camera view, defeating beasts is a matter of stringing the right combos together, and rhythmically tapping the right button in a seriesuf quick-time mini-games. The environment can also come in handy, as it's possible to kick a monster off his ledge.

While the early monsters can be laid to waste with a few lashes of your trusty sword, you do eventually have to resort to the various combos. When these go right, they can be spectacular, but the combat is one sticking point that might turn people off. Indeed every time we stormed off in disgust during the review it was a result of boredom having circled a monster for 10 minutes, pressed pause to access the combos menu, attempted to remember a couple and then spent valuable minutes of our lives chipping away at his health bar, which replenishes if Elika has to save your life.

Almost as tacit acknowledgement of this time-sapping routine, some of the bosses will piss off halfway through a fight, only to reappear later to enable you to finish off the job. With the bosses becoming progressively harder as the game continues, they each take longer to beat, and given that you can't actually die, time is your only currency. Well, time and your fingers, as this is an area of the game that betrays its console roots.

Tapping out combos on a pad is less ruinous, both to the hardware and to your index finger, which can seize up in the midst of a long scrap. Repetitive strain injury notwithstanding, having beaten the boss and healed the land, collectable 'light seeds' magically appear, a certain number of which grant Elika further powers enabling her to access more of the land and perform more healing.

These can be collected during some more predetermined platforming, and so it goes on, an essentially repetitive, if spellbinding and occasionally exhilarating, tour round a magical world with a Princess hanging off your back, a few nonsensical cutscenes, a clutch of rudimentary puzzles and some vaguely sinister-dream sequences. Hardcore gamers will inevitably dismiss POP as not being challenging enough, but you'd have to have a steel heart not to be slightly seduced by the fantastical setting.

That said, the magic is shattered the minute the Prince opens his mouth, proving to be an appalling dullard. All the same, this is a brave attempt at doing something different in a gaming marketplace littered with war and aliens.

Despite being the work of Ubisoft Montreal, it's probably as far away from a Tom Clancy-branded title as it's possible to get. And despite an original approach to the gameplay, in many ways POP is imbued with an old-school sensibility kill the boss, save the girl. Although she spends a lot more time saving you, and you do sometimes feel like a spare prick at a wedding, bringing little more to the party than a series of excruciating one-liners and some functional swordplay. All the same there's a definite elegance to the action, with the sublime animation complementing the setting, and a superbly realised colour palette that visually demonstrates the difference between the corrupted and healed areas.

It's undeniably charming, but how long you remain charmed depends largely on your patience. Proving anything but regal, this is arguably one of the most misjudged examples of scriptwriting to sully the already dismal world of games scripting. There would be more dignity in silence. And he does himself no favours by fighting her dad and inadvertently dancing on her mum's tomb.

A class act. We thought we'd focus on this classic game because it ties in nicely with the release of Prince of Persia 2. At first sight, Prince of Persia doesn't seem to offer anything over and above traditional platform fare. It has a disgustingly yucky storyline: young princess and handsome mysterious traveller fall in love and put the wind up the evil Jaffar who, in the absence of the girl's father, wants to have his own wicked way with the princess, so he locks them both up and the hero has to fight his way through several levels of dungeon and palace to rescue his beloved.

I know, it makes you want to puke doesn't It? Look beyond the sickly sweet plot however, and you have a game that excels in several different ways. The most fundamental and refreshing new feature in Prince of Persia is the superb quality of the animation.

Author Jordan Mechner made videos of his brother performing all the actions that the main character would be likely to undertake, like running, climbing and so on, and used the film as a basis for his animations. The result is the smoothest, most fluid, and most realistic animation ever seen in a game of this type. You can edge up to the tops of chasms, where the prince will topple slightly before stepping back. Run fast and then change directions rapidly and he will slide realistically.

But beyond that, Prince of Persia is a cracking good game. The Opera Mini web browser ran almost flawlessly and we were pretty happy with it. It was running fullscreen, it accepted touch command easily and it also allowed for auto screen rotation. Using the Opera Mini Java application is really nice. Using Gmail for Mobile Java app.

With all Java games, the handset offers a virtual D-pad and gaming A, B, C, D buttons so you can make use of non-touch-enabled games. There's an option to hide those controls, but that doesn't mean you will be able to play Java games fullscreen - they have fixed resolutions. One of the Java game titles that we tried Prince of Persia had a special version for and accepted touch commands.

The other Java titles intended for QVGA resolution required the use of the virtual controls which in one case were not sufficient. Playing the touch-enabled Prince of Persia still gets you the virtual controls. So summing it up, the Nokia XpressMusic third-party application support is a mixed bag and you have to either test applications for yourself or turn to the online forums for a heads-up. Nokia XpressMusic comes with a built-in GPS receiver and judging on our experience it seems a highly sensitive unit.

The handset managed to acquire satellite lock from cold start in a moving car in about two minutes which is basically as good as it gets. A-GPS might have sliced a few additional seconds from that time had it been turned on. The large high-resolution screen sounds like a serious premise for reasonable use as a dedicated navigation unit. Unfortunately, the XpressMusic has no free voice guided navigation, unlike most other Nokia GPS-enabled devices recently, but that could be expected with that kind of price tag.

The phone also comes with Nokia Maps 2. As you might have guessed this is merely a touch-enabled version of the standard Nokia Maps 2. It offers extensive map coverage for free but you do need to pay for most of its extra features such as traffic information or city guides. As we just mentioned you will also have to buy the voice-guided navigation license, should you pick the application for the purpose. At least the actual purchase itself is quite simple directly via the phone interface.

If you prefer an alternative navigation software, you might want to carefully look around for a compatible version. The touch-enabled Nokia Maps application itself is doing pretty well in terms of features too. It has four different view modes including satellite and hybrid maps. Those however do need an internet connection. The more regular 2D and 3D view modes are also at hand. Nokia Maps 2. The route planning algorithm is also rather easy to customize to best suit your preferences. Toll roads and motorways can be avoided and so can tunnels and ferries.

Route selection can be set to either fastest or shortest. The app is also usable for pedestrian navigation or you can switch the GPS receiver off and use the phone as a hand-held map. Some of the available settings. However, we do have some to say about touch implementation. The lack of a dedicated shortcut on the screen means you need to enter the options menu to center the map back to your current position after you have panned in some direction - in a regular keypad handset, the 0 key will take care of that.

On the positive side, panning and zooming in the maps is really fast and the high-res screen is capable of showing quite a lot of data. To make use of that, the users of devices running S60 3. Ovi Maps navigation is currently available in 74 countries and 46 languages, with even traffic information for more than 10 of those.

In addition Nokia have also substantially upgraded the Ovi Maps application itself, so it now packs a cooler looking interface, the Lonely planet city guide and Michelin restaurant guide with lots and lots of points of interest.

There's also an events guide that lists all events happening within a 3km radius of your position and provides you with details on each one. You can download the latest update from the Ovi Store or from here. OK then, what we have here is two newbies in the touchscreen league.

A fact's a fact, but it's not exactly the kind of newbies everyone will look down at. Market leaders Nokia and the top selling smartphone platform must be ready to take a few beatings at the start of season but will hardly settle in for a long losing streak.

The competition is already in their second or third generation of touchscreen devices so the battle will be tough. What's more, the number two manufacturer, Samsung, is also into S60 so Nokia may as well be taking due precautions against getting beaten in their own game.