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New Prince of Persia move unveiled

Plus: why he sounds American.

Ubisoft has revealed a new acrobatic move for the titular character of the new Prince of Persia game.

During a demo at the Leipzig Games Convention, level designer Michael MacIntyre showed off the roof run - a move that enables the Prince to cling to ceilings and traverse them upside down. He can also grab objects hanging down from the ceiling to prolong his run.

"To wall run in the previous Prince of Persia, you would just hold down a button when near a wall and he would do it," said MacIntyre. "In this game the acrobatics are very jump-centric; you actually have to jump at a wall, and then it detects what angle you're hitting it at, and he'll run when he hits it.

"It's a similar thing with the roof run. When you come in contact with the ceiling you jump, you do the run and then you have to hit the glove button to grab any element on the roof in order to keep going. So there's a rhythm to it," he continued.

"With this new move, our level designers had all the tools they needed to create acrobatic sequences that can use pretty much every surface in the game."

There's not much else to report from the demo, seeing as the same level was shown at E3 last month. MacIntyre confirmed there will be PS3 Trophies in the game, and that they're not planning to do a downloadable demo. The Prince still sounds like he's from America, rather than, you know, Persia. Why is that?

"I think it was just accessibility," said MacIntyre. "Even in the original one he had a British accent, right? He wasn't very Persian either. It's just one of those things.

"The character doesn't even necessarily look Persian, but the Persian part is not so much him as much as just the spirit of the world," he added. Righto.

Prince of Persia is out on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 this "holiday", as the Prince would say.

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