Hi, I'm writing an article on "Time Manipulation as game design element", i.e.: - Time freezing: Max Payne, Enter The Matrix - Time rewind: Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Can anyone recommend other games that uses Time Manipulation? Any game that uses "Time fast-forward"? Tom. Tom Söderlund, Game producer, Daydream

I never got a chance to play it, but that Xbox game BLINX (or was it BINKS? Lol...) had some time manipulation stuff. Check that out.

I have not played it, but I believe Viewtiful Joe used time effects. I think bullet-time is far too overdone and is more of a fad. Thusfar, I think that the idea of time manipulation has been used far too superficially and studies of past examples are not sufficient enough to understand the potential of the element. If photographs and still art can bring the idea of time into a new perspective, video games should be able to do interesting things as well--and not just "rewind/fast forward".

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Original post by dgaf I have not played it, but I believe Viewtiful Joe used time effects. I think bullet-time is far too overdone and is more of a fad. Thusfar, I think that the idea of time manipulation has been used far too superficially and studies of past examples are not sufficient enough to understand the potential of the element. If photographs and still art can bring the idea of time into a new perspective, video games should be able to do interesting things as well--and not just "rewind/fast forward".

OH. MY. GOD. You haven't played Viewtiful Joe? That game actually used a "bullet-timeish" thing called Slow-Mo, but...

YOU HAVEN'T PLAYED VIEWTIFUL JOE?!

And I almost agree with you, but I don't think you've played the game The Specialists (Half-Life mod). It's a personal favorite of mine, because it brought the "bullet-time" fad to online in a stylish way.

HAVE YOU PLAYED VIEWTIFUL JOE YET? YOU NEED TO!!!!oneone!!

You should check out the old adventure game, "Day of the Tentacle".

You were playing 3 different characters; when the game began, all 3 characters ended up in a different age: past, present, and future. You were able to switch from a character to another at any time.

Things you did / puzzles you solved in the past times affected the future times, and the whole game was based on that idea.. pretty refreshing, although the puzzles were very hard.

For example at the beginning, your character in the future time was stuck in a tree. You had to prevent the tree from being planted in the past times, so that your character wouldn't be stuck in the future one..

I've never seen that concept reused on other games, and that's a shame, really.

Sometimes i wonder if it was possible to design a multiplayer game (MMORPG?) with this kind of concept ? That would be dead fun.

Y.

Problem: Time Control and multiplayer. Hard to do that...

Bullet Time UT had one player as "the one" who controls time Max-Payne style - if you killed him, you got the power.

Laxy Matrix UT just scaled time based on how much action was happening. It didnt' work well - usually was always slow or always fast, depending on the # of players.

Or you could do it locally, but it would be freaky having different "zones" of time. Either way, its a mess. Never as easy as singleplayer.

They use the classical idea of time travel, but games like Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Chrono Trigger did it well, where doing things in one "timezone" might effect the future/past world.

You can have 8 basic abilities of time, but if you count freeze self, freeze enemy, etc it would be 40 actions with time. You have to lay out a diagram to see it all.
How do I know? Well I talked about something like that once on how to get more things, but many didn't get it but my signature explains it again.
Also I was going to make a time theme game but maybe later on. There was a contest about time at which every game that entered sucked in the use of time, as I stated 2 weeks ago and they could have done a better game but decided to just have fun programming something. http://www.acsv.net/acsite/competition_index.php

If you still want to know it would be more fun to dissect thing and find it out, I am sure you will find that more fun than just me saying. Well to give you one idea it would be to double yourself. ;)
But maybe you should write about something else. How about educational games? Just a suggestion since you can not find an ultimate game about time since no one has done one well enough, but one that comes close is what one said about blinks the time cat which you can read about some time abilities it has.
Good luck

Check out Viewtiful Joe. That game did an awesome job of using time manipulation. It has slow-motion, fast forward, and (not really a time mechanism) zoom. To solve the puzzles throughout the game you have to use any or even all of these powers at the same time. Really sweet game!

The Specialists team got bullet time right, plain and simple. I'm not sure of their exact method of "bullet-time", but whenever the "slow-mo" was activated models animated slower and bullet speed was slowed drastically. It's really hard to explain, but the final effect is very cool; nothing beats diving off a building in lobby with an m16, slowing things down and burst-firing someone in the head for 3 frags.

Too bad they messed up so horribly on the entire teamplay/objective element...now it'll just be "that awesome DM mod".