Another entry on my quest to TASing every port of Prince of Persia (cough Myst cough). For this one I chose the european version of the game which contains three crucial differences:

This movie completes every single one of the 14 original levels faster than the current publication ([1193] Genesis Prince of Persia by Aqfaq in 19:03.48). The addition of the 4 new levels is what eventually makes slower time-wise. See the movie below for a clearer side-by-side comparison

Basically gates don't exist.

Also, when the level exit door is open, you can leave the level using the level entry door, even if it looks closed. I discovered this by accident thanks to the bot, who just found this while exploring less optimal routes. This is only applicable on the new levels as, in all the original levels, the trigger that opens the exit door is always closer to the proper exit door than to the entry door.

Darkman425: Sure I'll tackle a bit of complicated rulings as I claim this for judging.

Darkman425: It's a good thing I chatted with staff before finalizing my judgment notes. I feel more confident on how to tackle this.

First is the easy part: optimization for this looks solid, especially the sections that are comparable with the previous publication outside of the new glitch implementations. No problems to be seen there, so nice work!

The second is the more complicated matter: how do we handle games with added content not seen in other versions? This was brought up in the submission thread as well as in the staff chat that maybe the regional versions should be separate publications.

My initial judgment, based on some missing information, was that the PAL version would obsolete the NTSC version since, outside of added levels and the PAL version effectively running ~4.167% faster than the NTSC version due to optimizations, the content overlapped and thus the PAL version would obsolete the NTSC version.

Since this was complicated to me, I shared my initial draft with the staff. Thankfully, Spikestuff pointed out that Tenchu: Stealth Assassins has separate publications for the JP and US versions of the game. While there's also some version exclusive glitches there, the main factor is that the JP version simply has less mandatory content than the US version but have been published alongside each other. While, as far as I and the author know, there isn't any known mechanical differences between the NTSC and PAL versions of Prince of Persia I an choosing to have them as separate publications due to a situation that feels like a strong argument for splitting regional versions despite the heavy content overlap. I don't feel like that's going to be a problem for the author either since this post reads to me as him being fine with however this obsoletion situation would be handled. Now that I feel more confident with the information I have on hand, I feel more confident in saying...

Accepting to Standard as a new regional branch for Genesis Prince of Persia.

EZGames69: Processing...