Full Of Eastern Promise

No, this isn't a film adaptation of Fry's Turkish Delight, but rather news that Jerry Bruckheimer has scooped up the rights to console hit Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. For some of you this will conjure images of the early nineties Amiga game that introduced the pipedream of fluid animation to an otherwise simplistic platform game. Well, the franchise has come a long way since then and The Sands of Time has proved a hit on PC and across the consoles as a next generation 3D game complete with Matrix-esque slo-mo and some very nifty acrobatics. The general story is of a Prince (no prizes for guessing where of) who, along with his imperialistic father, sacks the Maharajah's palace, kidnaps his daughter and steals two precious artefacts: an oversize hourglass and a mysterious dagger. Little do they know, however, that these objects can bestow great power upon the wielder and a tricksy vizier (aren't they all?) unleashes their power and turns everyone but the prince and the Maharajah's daughter, Princess Farah, into demons. Armed with a temporally charged dagger - which handily lets him reverse time - the prince sets out to save the day. The script is being worked on by the game's creator, Jordan Mechner, who used Bruckheimer's Pirates of the Caribbean as a template for the translation. "Rather than do a straight beat-for-beat adaptation of the new videogame, we're taking some cool elements from the game and using them to craft a new story - much as Pirates did with the theme park ride."