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Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time Offers New Gameplay Mechanic
Ars Technica has a great look at the latest installment in the Ratchet and Clank series, "A Crack in Time." Along with the great looking graphics and same great gameplay, A Crack in Time offers a brand new game mechanic: "time pads." Time pads allow you to make a copy of yourself and move through a series of action, then shift back to "real time" and interact with your past self. "It's a game mechanic that's hard to describe in words, and wrapping your head around it inside the game isn't much easier when it's first described with an example or two. You have to play with it and bend time to your will before you see just how ingenious the whole thing is. The puzzles begin simply and grow harder as the game moves on. The use of time is done very well and elevates what we've played of the game from another platforming experience to something truly special."
I think the indie game Braid was the first game to make this approach of time in games great. And if you develop the game good around that, it's great.
I loved Braid for the fact that even if I made a mistake, I would push the go back in time button instead of repeating quick-save/quick-load all the time when I fail. The levels could be made harder and more unforgiving too because you could always go back in time. And on its philosophy side it made me want to do the same thing for my past relationships, which is part of the story. Great game.
Actually I would like to see this in more games. Just go back in time instead of the quick-save/load bashing. It's a lot more fun too.
I'm pretty sure this has already been done. It's the entire point of the game Braid, and was probably done even before that.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
The idea isn't exactly brand new.
It's a game mechanic that's hard to describe in words, and wrapping your head around it inside the game isn't much easier when it's first described with an example or two.
Well, here's a handy tutorial then.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Does anyone remember Blinx: the timesweeper for XBox that was released at the beginning of the decade? If you're familiar with that game then this game mechanic seems not so new and maybe even a bit more limited (because of the pad requirement, if it is one). I hope it's well implemented because then it has the potential to make for some really awesome puzzles. I'm glad to see they're experimenting with higher dimensional puzzles again.
Sounds like the movie "Next".
As always, let's ask the basic question here that always relates to time travel.
What happens if you kill yourself or make it so you your other self can't take an action you already did?
I don't recall the name, but one of the indie developers at PAX '08 showed off a game with basically the same mechanic. You'd have to solve puzzles by having your character perform a task, then go back to the time machine and work with your past self/selves to achieve a goal.
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I love when the marketing department takes off to promote gimmicks like these. Who cares if there's a new gizmo in the transponder that makes the electrofuzz rain golden teardrops on your soul?
What matters in a game is if it's fun to play. Previous Ratchet & Clank games were fun, and I have reasonable hopes for this one as well. As for the gimmicks, I could care less (unless they start to detract from gameplay).
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
Looks like Beef Curtains beat me to the submit. It was Chronotron I was thinking about.
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When I read the description, the first thing I thought was that it was the little Cursor*10 flash game. Very cleverly done, it kept me busy for a while.
http://www.nekogames.jp/mt/2008/01/cursor10.html
Not that I mind a bit of ripping off, but I wouldn't call it new.
Time Donkey!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_&_Ted's_Excellent_Video_Game_Adventure
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
We've been working on this gameplay mechanic for more than a year now with our UT3 mod Prometheus. Here's a link to one of the completed levels to check it out. It's nice to see that others also see this as a new gametype that has a lot of potential. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRjU2IcJ1BM We've been making this mod for the latest MakeSomethingUnreal contest and have placed 1st for Phase 2 and 2nd for Phase 3, Phase 4 just closed a month ago and our fingers are crossed.
That doesn't sound so puzzling but I might be thinking four-dimensionally like Doc Brown told me to... no actually I think I understand it because I can imagine how it is programmed: it makes a savegame, then it records a demo of you playing, then it loads the savegame and plays the demo but lets you play while the demo is running...
so it might be like this: go and push the button that opens the door across the room (which closes when you leave the button) then you shift back, the recording of your actions goes and pushes the button (because that is what you did before), opening the door and you can pass it...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
so if maxx payne had "bullet time", do we call this concept "les paul time"?
Well yeah, sure, WE know that, but this reviewer is actually a time traveller from the past! A friend gave him Braid, he "couldn't wrap his head around it", and accidentally transported himself several months into the future. This is all new to him.
The underlying mechanism here is a way to record actions for later playback. Combine that with multithreading and it provides side-by-side scripting. Various shell environments provide different levels of keystroke recording for playback, for instance in a kiosk mode for demos. As somebody said, this is by no means new - I think there were teletype games with similar features.
How many levels of replication are possible? It would be pretty cool to clone an army of yourself through a few levels of binary replication. Can you save the recorded scripts to use under different circumstances?
Uh guys, you mention Braid all the time and it's time-reversal schtick... What about Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time? It's not as prevalent in the game but it was released many years beforehand.
Just putting that out there.
Perl, n. A language spoken by Eskimos.
It's not exactly Interacting with yourself in the past, but its the first game I can recall that had this type of gameplay. It came out long before Chronotron, features the same puzzle elements as Chronotron, and was originally in Japanese.
I played this game a while back, and it seems to have a similar game mechanic. The basic premise is that you get ten goes to get to the top of the tower. but each time all of the ghosts of your prior plays help you collect things or break things or hold down buttons so you can proceed, etc. but you can do fun things like hold down the button for a while, so your future self can proceed, then go back and do something else with that turn. I got a huge kick out of it, and i would hope that the mechanic is similar, if not more prince of persia-y. http://www.nekogames.jp/mt/2008/01/cursor10.html
Hey you beat me to that! Yes, indeed that was a good game, ars is being and arse claiming this is a brand new concept simply because it is the first large budget game to use it.
But... the future refused to change.
Will this be as big a hit as Blinx: The Time Sweeper, which had pretty much the same mechanic in a high profile 3d platformer 7 years ago?
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Back to the future 2 and 3 (one game) did this back in 1989, but the object was to avoid contact with yourself and in turn avoid blowing up the universe.
By a time travelling cat. The idea had already been done, and was required heavily to finish the game
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinx:_The_Time_Sweeper#Time_Controls
Specifically 'Record'.
To quote the game: BLIIIIIIIIIIIINX!
Creative types tend to be connected to some kind of "thought-wave" generator which spits out whole-cloth ideas at the same time and broadcasts them to the world. If the "thought-wave" is strong enough and enough people are affected by it, they squirrel away and work on some version of the idea and then birth it into the public a couple of years after the wave front hit. Then the whole planet is affected. High-level culture engineering.
This one I felt strongly a few years ago. I suddenly woke up one morning with the overwhelming desire to make an RTS game with a time element. But I'm not a programmer, so it sat idle. But others have been better placed to act on this sort of thing. I wonder what the end purpose is to introducing humanity to the idea that time is not solid or linear?
Curious.
-FL
What the hell is this inaccurate article??
If anyone's interested, there's an old Flash game with a similar mechanic here. Clever little diversion, and time can be both a fun and non-gimmicky mechanic.
All of these Slashdotters talking about new-fangled games like Braid and Chronotron, but not one mention of the game which did it 25 years ago.
Rob
When seemingly uneducated folks want to give credit for a new gameplay mechanic when it's really quite old. Curser 10, Chronotron, Braid have already been mentioned, and there are even more variations. Some of them don't even involve time, merely just making copies/replicas of yourself and instructing them so you can interact with them to compete a game segment.
It's a cool idea, but one has to be careful with the implementation. Should the required sequences be difficult to execute or coordinate, with no easy way to diagnose and repair any poorly planned segments, then players may be turned off.
It really just boils down to an interesting puzzle wrapper on allowing the player to 'program' game events. Worth exploring, I'll wait for the reviews to come in on Ratchet & Clank.