On Time Travel

ExileNZ

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Mackheath said:
Hubilub said:
We need to send fan-mail to this Chris E!

Quickly, someone start a fanclub!
i think cris e is eh pretty cool guy. eh fights Yahtzee and doesn't afraid of anything.

Ah well, fail troll is fail, so I will simply hoist my 2 cents on top of this pile of loose change.

Time travel is always a confusing subject for me; the only game I really understood it with was TimeSPlitters and-after a year- Second Sight. Which, during the first playthrough, skull-fucked my sense of knowing.
I'm a big fan of Chrono Trigger, but I'm also definitely stepping up for Second Sight. Major brain-fuck and so worth it. The one thing that sucked was (spoiler) the hero's magical ability to stand around in cutscenes while imoportant people get killed (/spoiler).
 

songnar

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No mention of The Journeyman Project series at all? Shame, I rather liked The Legacy of Time.
 

Thedayrecker

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*sigh* I just wish Darkest of Days (which has time travel, so it isn't off topic) didn't suck balls....
 

SFR

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Pseudonym2 said:
One thing that bothered me in all of these games is how the characters stay on the same planet. If the planet,sun, and galaxy are in orbit, wouldn't traveling through time involve getting stuck in space?
That is an extremely good point. Steven Hawking asked "Where's all the time travelers?" The answer? Dead in space.
 
Jan 13, 2010
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I loved the use of time travel, or rather, time distortion, in Outcast (Appeal, 1999), where you and another group of scientists enter a foreign world because they want to fix a homemade portal ticking like a time bomb, but enter at different times. Anyone familiar with that game?
 

Phuctifyno

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maninahat said:
My favourite time travel game so far would be in one episode during the second season of Sam & Max. Hilarious, clever, and the logic is a lot more straight foward than that of traditional point and click adventure games.
"You j-JERKS!!!!","You made us live the last year and a half all over again." - Best time travel gag I think I 've ever seen. lol

But yeah, I'm on board with Majora's Mask. What makes it work is the daily schedules all of the NPC's have that can be intervened with and used to move forward in a timeline outside of time.

And why hasn't anybody mentioned Turtles In Time?
 

duchaked

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Premonition said:
Oh, well, Chrissy is my personal hero at this point. Such style and grace. I have not seen such great debating since, well, ever.
My personal favorite game involving time traveling has to be the very splendid TimeSplitter franchise. Most notably: TimeSplitters 3. There's time traveling in it so it's allowed xD

Edit: Also, Final Fantasy 8 deserves a mention for being so bat-shit insanely stupid.
Chris...inspiration, entertainment, representation of us all indeed

TimeSplitters =D loved those games...not sure if I ever fully finished 3 but had some great times with 2

mmm FF8, such a beautifully written plot involving time travel... cough. lol no
 

Knifewounds

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The Noble Shade said:
Why can't people simply acknowledge the opinions of others without using crass insults to berate them.

Good article though. I have an idea for a game I want to make, and this article convinced me not to use time-travel mechanics. I just don't think I could implement them properly.
Speaking as a game designer I think the best way to implement time travel is to have it effect the current scenario. Lets say the your time traveling machine can only take you 3 minutes in the pasts, and 3 minutes into the future, and the scenario is, A group of about 2 swat teams consisting of 4 people rush into a large warehouse from the 2 different doors while you were looting the place for important documents around the middle of area were its easy to get flanked, and killed. Now if your a good level designer you'll make it so there are many ways to get out of this dilemma. One of which would be to go back in time to warn your self about to attack, tell him exactly where the documents are, and form an attack plan to take out the teams since there are now 2 of you able to fight them off, or form an escape plan that requires both of your selves to reach a window that would require a boast to reach. Now what I just described was a relatively generic action scene commonly found in games, but I wanted to give a simple example of how to use time travel to effect the scenario's set up, but now you have to think about all the awesome things that changing the levels outcomes would have on the story, I mean you could have how you use your powers subtly, or majorly effect the plot as it flows. Let me explain. This version of time travel makes it easy to accidentally clone your self, and within all the confusion of doing that way to often would cause the main character to have an identity crisis which could effect his combat performance due the the anxiety he/she would feel from thinking he/she just the memories of someone else who inadvertently duplicated him/herself. This would also effect the characters motives, and course of actions that would greatly change the outcome whatever was happening in the plot. This kind of design would also leave room to make a less linear game which many time traveling games seem to lack which is ironic because wouldn't time travel effect the whole flow of things? I think the main flaw with a lot of these games is that time travel is often just used as a way to fix mistakes, or slow down time to get a shot into someone before they have time to pull the trigger.
 

your evil twin

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EightGaugeHippo said:
Timesplitters has time trvvel in it, but does it count since there is no game mechanics revolving around time manipulation?
The third game Timesplitters: Future Perfect does use time travel as a mechanic. There are several bits of the game where your future self gives your past self a key or useful device or weapon... and in some levels you actually team up with yourself to protect yourself! (There are some levels that have 4 versions of yourself all at the same time!) There's also a level that features time disruption grenades that cause anyone caught in the blast to go into slow motion bullettime.

Loonerinoes said:
Either way...I am moreso than ever intrigued by the last game on the list now.
TimeShift is quite fun, and a must-have if you like bullet time or time manipulation etc etc. It's starts off so-so (not bad but not great), but gets better when you're about an hour in.

Pro-tip: if you play on PC, rebind the controls so the mousewheel is for time powers rather than scroll weapons. Scroll up to slow time, down to reverse it, and press middle mouse to freeze it. Also, don't get it on Steam. The Steam version is unpatched, version 1.0.

Nice thing about xbox 360 version is that it had exclusive multiplayer DLC mappacks, one of them was free. Not many people play TimeShift multiplayer anymore, but there's usually one or two games active.

(Yes, I have it on both PC and 360, because the only people playing multiplayer on PC were Russians that wanted to play in nothing but one-bullet-kills mode. So I bought it for 360 for about £2, and can now play a proper deathmatch game.)
 

EightGaugeHippo

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your evil twin said:
EightGaugeHippo said:
Timesplitters has time trvvel in it, but does it count since there is no game mechanics revolving around time manipulation?
The third game Timesplitters: Future Perfect does use time travel as a mechanic. There are several bits of the game where your future self gives your past self a key or useful device or weapon... and in some levels you actually team up with yourself to protect yourself! (There are some levels that have 4 versions of yourself all at the same time!) There's also a level that features time disruption grenades that cause anyone caught in the blast to go into slow motion bullettime.
WOW, as if I actually forgot about all that!
I was thinking more along the lines of "at the push of a button" time manipulation though. But yeah, I guess TS:FP does count now.

BTW
I lol'd at your post, you just described my favorite game to me. =D
I really hate that puzzle where there are four Cortezs.
 

Dash-X

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Aug 17, 2009
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I liked Majora's Mask (even though I didn't finish it). It was like the movie Groundhog's Day, except it took place over three days instead of one, and the moon was threatening to kill everything. Two words: Milk Bar.
 

TimeLord

For the Emperor!
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Aug 15, 2008
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Time Travel in games is rarely done well.

Ratchet and Clank did good time manipulation, but not travel

TimeSplitters time travel did not have direct effect on anything else. It was just used to make cool battlegrounds for the shoot outs. (Note: I have not played TS3)

I can't think of anything else at the moment.

Damn the:
[HEADING=1]Time Paradoxes![/HEADING]
 

Steve the Pocket

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Mar 30, 2009
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Next week: Games that use time travel as an excuse to set the levels in different eras instead of just different places around the world. (Crash Bandicoot: Warped, Pac-Man: Adventures in Time, etc.) I swear there are as many of those as there are legitimate time travel games, if not more.
 

RC1138

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Dec 9, 2009
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Probably Darkest of Days. And probably for the same reason Yahtzee found it interesting in his ZP review; something about shooting the entire confederate army with a future assault rifle. That said it's about as realistic depiction of time travel as some of Yahtzee's analogies.
 

El_Moss

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Jul 21, 2009
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Though not technically time TRAVEL, when anyone mentions gameplay involving time manipulation Braid is the game that comes to my mind. I think it might be my favourite game ever, it's definitely one of them.