Gaming: How To Remaster Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time Yourself, Since...

With hopes dashed for an official remake, here's the next best option.

The future of Prince of Persia has never seemed more fraught, as Ubisoft's money men announce a major reshuffling at the company. Jobs have been lost and multiple games have been cancelled, including the long-delayed and much-wanted remake of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.

While the fate of Ubisoft's many studios is the more pressing concern (including staff already going on strike), along with the threat of a pivot towards even more live service games and generative AI, a gamer-level problem is that one of Ubi's most iconic adventures exists in a surprisingly sorry state.

Fortunately we're PC gaming nerds, and we know how to solve such problems.

If you don't already own a modern digital copy of Sands Of Time, you've got a few options. The first and most convenient is Steam, where the game goes for around $12 (£9). At the time of writing, the Ubisoft Store has the game discounted down to under $3 (£2), although, yes, you'll have to download it through their app. You can launch it through Steam after doing so.

The third option is GOG, but you might want to wait just to buy there: At the time of writing, GOG has just announced that Sands of Time will soon be part of the Preservation Program, likely bringing a suite of tweaks and improvements to make it play a bit more gracefully on modern hardware 'out of the box'.

As with many PS2-era games, Sands of Time doesn't run great on modern machines, with poor controller support plus wonky post-processing and anti-aliasing. While there are plenty of granular tweaks you can pick up on Nexus Mods or ModDB, there are two more comprehensive options available that I recommend.

The fastest way to buff out the ravages of time is the humbly titled Fix Compilation, assembled by game preservation enthusiast Vinícius Medeiros, who has done similar work on many games from that awkward time before good PC ports. The pack is designed to be as simple and seamless as possible:

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

Just download and unpack the ZIP file to your Prince Of Persia directory, overwriting files as required.

Source: PC Gamer