That statement is true for all games, to a degree. Control interpretation is a fundamental part of any game. I can hear the nerd rage building within you, but give me a second, this will all tie together in a bit. In any game, when the player presses a button, any on screen action is an interpretation of that press (unless the avatar on screen is also pressing a button). In Super Mario Bros, the player hits a button and the Italian jumps. While the two actions aren’t the same, the player feels ownership over the action due to a variety of elements – the immediacy of the action, the visual cue, and sound response (the boing sound, you know what it is).

So far there’s no problem. The player feels in control and empowered. As is the case with Prince of Persia, the problems arise when players no longer feel like they’re directly in control of their avatar. More modern games with loads of animation have struggled with this. Say you have a character that’s running. At any moment, the player can instruct the character to jump, but how do you change from a running animation to a jumping animation in a smooth way?

Non-realistic games like Super Mario Galaxy can get around this because, well, it’s not realistic. Who cares if a cartoon immediately changes from a run to a jump? However, when a realistic-looking dude launches airbone instantly from a full sprint… it just looks weird. One solution is to throw a few frames of animation in there to transition from the run to the jump. Now there’s a slight delay between the push and the action, and the player feels just a bit disconnected. The two are related inversely; the more animation, the better the looks, but the looser the controls.

PoP opted to go full-bore with animation and as a result the game looks great. The Prince’s moves are smooth as hell (which I assure you is quite smooth, not firey and red as Christian dogma would have you believe), and platforming segments are entirely seamless. Such animation introduces a conundrum involving controls. Either you require precise timing with no easy way to indicate to the player exactly when they need to hit the button – aside from, y’know, putting a button on the screen – or you open the timing window to reduce the frustration. Either you get people complaining that the game is cheap and needlessly frustrating (Mirror’s Edge), or you get people complaining that it’s not cheap and needlessly frustrating enough. Freaking internet, damned if you do, damned if you don’t.