Time travel games?

[Herbert1405241469 0]

I just love the concept of time travel. Shadow of Destiny (an adventure game made by Konami) and the Journeyman Project series (also adventure games made by the now defunct Presto Studios) are great representations of how time travel could be implimented into games.

Get a demo for Shadow of Memories (the European name for the same game)
here:
http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/


Oh I forgot ChronoTrigger for the SNES. That was a classic.

Does anyone else know of any good time travel games out there?

[Eric Straven 0]

Yes, Chrono Trigger is INDEED a classic SNES game by Squaresoft. I don't know many time travel games but what about the Blast from the Past and Back to the future games for various platforms? Hell, why not Final Fantasy VIII(8)

[Herbert1405241469 0]

Ugh, Back to the Future and BTTF 2&3 were horrible I heard a couple people trying to make Back to the Future conversions for modern day games like GTA:Vice City and FarCry, but none of them ever finished them.

[d-and-d 0]

Time travel games are difficult to do properly because if you revisit an area the game should really log every movement that the player made in case the player and the players past self come into contact. Wierd huh! I'm not that good at following time travel really.

[RGF 0]

Yeah Shadow of Destiny was a good game kinda weird though but the idea is kinda weird also I mean I saw something on TV about Time travel like think of it this way if you went back in time to your first day at school and then left wouldn't you keep going back in time over and over again because the old you the first one that went back in time. After you got their wouldn't the future you end up going back in time also? just like the first one but then the you going to school that the future you went to see grow up and wouldn't he back in time just like the first one. and what was with the guy in shadow of destiny did he seem like the devil or was it just me?

[Mopperkont 0]

Day Of The Tentacle had a cool timetravel effect, didn't it? Playing in both times at the same time.

[kap43 0]

Chronno Trigger was deffinitely THE time travel RPG of it's era. That game was fantastic. It was real crazy when you got the Wings of Time and could actually see how you helped, or messed up the past, present, and future.

It is still one of my favorite games. The plot of time travel always adds a very cool theme to a game b/c you find that you are actually fighting for the future when it all comes together.

The past is behind us. The future is beyond us. But today is our gift. That is why it is called the present.

[Mahanon 0]

Um, the only Time Travel Game I know of is Crono Trigger. What a great game this is I still play it all the multiple endings depending on what era you defeat Lavos in SUPER FREAKEN COOL GAME, the characters are great and the story is good what else do you need to ask for.....I'm sure there are far more time travel games out there but we just haven't gotten our hands on them yet......

[Gayla 0]

Here's a suggestion for a time travel game, but I should point out that it's a text adventure without graphics and that I wrote it myself. But it's free...

While playing, you can run into yourself and end up cooperating with or interfering with the actions that you've already taken on a previous trip to the same time period. The game is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but it presents a consistent philosophy about time travel paradoxes, involving the conservation of uncertainty. It's got a well-developed story line and people have told me that it was fairly addicting and fun to play. The girlfriend of one of my early beta-testers told me she was very glad when her boyfriend and his roommate finished playing the game, because they hadn't talked about anything else for a couple of weeks and she felt like a gaming widow!

The name of the game is "Finding Martin". Here's the link for a free download: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

This web page provides a free download of the game executable, playable on any PC running Windows. The game is in the later stages of beta-test, close to release.

[Herbert1405241469 0]

Haha, I forgot all about this topic Wow, that's very cool. I have a concept in my head for a 3D time travel video game, but there are a couple problems that would come up when trying to program it.1. How would the computer handle the sheer amount of data required for recording all the player's movements? I know there are algorythms for this, but for the idea I have, it's a problem 2. How would the computer handle what would happen if you bumped into yourself and thus changed your past? Would an AI routine kick in and do what it thinks the player might have done? or do you disappear instantly and retake control of your past self... now that it's past has been altered? the latter would certainly tick off players if they had gotten far in the game, only to accidentally bump into their past selves and have to start way back at an earlier point in their gameplay.3. Programming-wise, how would the computer dynamically alter the entire history from the point of a change in the past all the way through the future? Say you knocked a guy out for one hour, and he missed his dinner, and thus spawned a whole chain of mistimed events... the computer would need to take a couple hours sorting through all the various effects that this would have on not only the man and his future, but also the other people this affected and their futures....If I could figure those out, I'd have the forumula for a kickass time travel simulator.... Of course, now, some jerk is going to figure it out and steal my idea

[Gayla 0]

Yes, the amount of data in recording past moves has been a problem for me too, even though my game is a text adventure and not a 3D graphics game. My game doesn't work easily on all platforms; it needs some work-arounds to handle paging memory issues on some operating systems.<<2. How would the computer handle what would happen if you bumped into yourself and thus changed your past? Would an AI routine kick in and do what it thinks the player might have done? or do you disappear instantly and retake control of your past self... now that it's past has been altered? the latter would certainly tick off players if they had gotten far in the game, only to accidentally bump into their past selves and have to start way back at an earlier point in their gameplay.>>The instructions that come with my game give very strong advice recommending that the player do a "game save" before each time travel trip. Some players don't like unforgiving games, but others don't seem to mind them as long as the author is up-front about it.However, just "bumping into youself" is not necessarily a paradox. After all, that's one of the coolest things that can happen! In my particular game I do it like this: When you first push your way through the time portal, you feel weak and insubstantial. In order to survive, you absorb some of the essence of the surrounding environment. This enables you to keep from fading away entirely, but it's not enough to make you visible to the people in that time period. And you won't be able to manipulate any objects there until you get yourself a pair of special gloves that enable an electromagnetic connection. But you can still affect the past by dropping things there, even if you haven't gotten the gloves yet.The second time you push through the portal, you try to draw essence from the surroundings but there isn't enough available because it's already being drawn somewhere else. So you trace the flow of the essence and discover an invisible presence lying next to you. You take some essence from this guy, and as you do so, he becomes visible! It's your previous self. You realize that the reason you can see him is because you have absorbed some of his essence. But he still can't see you, so there's no paradox unless you lock a door that he's about to go through or take the object he's about to take or something like that.Three trips to the same time period are permitted, but on the fourth trip there isn't enough extra essence to support so many versions of yourself, and so you shrink into a singularity and disappear.There are some exceptions to the rule about being invisible to the natives of that time period, but explaining that here would be a spoiler.<<3. Programming-wise, how would the computer dynamically alter the entire history from the point of a change in the past all the way through the future? Say you knocked a guy out for one hour, and he missed his dinner, and thus spawned a whole chain of mistimed events... the computer would need to take a couple hours sorting through all the various effects that this would have on not only the man and his future, but also the other people this affected and their futures....>>True, true. Time travel without influencing the past would be boring, but, on the other hand, I just can't swallow the idea of changing the past from one state of certainty into a different state of certainty. It just doesn't make sense to me in a single-world scenario. The multi-world scenario is a different ball of wax, of course, but I haven't gone there in this game.So my game has a limited set of opportunities to influence the past, areas in which there is a inversion of uncertainty and an opportunity for circular causation. For example, you might look at a patch of dirt and get a migraine headache, feeling sick because you are fairly certain that this is just an empty patch of dirt, but you can't help suspecting that you might have sensed the possibility that a sycamore tree could be growing there. Anyone else would think that there already is a tree there, but as the agent of the causation you have uncertainty about it. You can't actually see or climb the tree until you swap the uncertainty into the past, enabling you to go back and plant a sycamore seed in the patch of dirt without violating the principle of conservation of uncertainty.One of the things you need to change in this game is the motivation for the person who will eventually invent the gloves. But of course you can't actually see or use the gloves until you actualize their invention, so you'll have to take care of that the hard way...I guess my game is pretty hard to play, only two people have finished so far as I can tell. There probably aren't that many who are interested in something that's so challenging to actually win. So don't be mad, there's not really any competition here.

[Herbert1405241469 0]

That actually sounds like an awesome game, I'll have to try it when I get some free time.

A book I read that deals with time travel and the paradoxes that come with it is "Up The Line" by Robert Silverberg, written in the late 60's. Being from the 60's, it has a lot of hippie free love, and drug usage influences, but overall a good story. Silverberg covers a heck of a lot of paradoxes and rules about time travel that I hadn't really even considered at the time before I read the book:

"Accumulation Paradox": The book uses the example of Christ's Crucifixion, and you avoided it in your game by making the player invisible... If a person visits the same event in time many times, would every version of that person already be there? or does it accumulate after each trip. In other words: if Christ's Crucifixion was a "hot spot" for time tourists, and they kept going back there over and over again, eventually there would be hundreds of thousands of people all standing around watching the event, though history has not recorded such a mass of people being there at the time. It's explained better in the book

"Transit Displacement Paradox": This was used in the book as a sort of loophole to prevent the main character from instantly being altered by his actions. This just simply states that when a time traveler is not in his "present time" he is not in his own "time matrix" and is protected by a "temporal bubble" that conserves his history, despite how his new present has now changed.

"Discontinuity Paradox": Happens when you bump into someone that left from a future time than you did, and thus knows more about you and your future than you do. This can also work in reverse when you run into someone that is from a past present, with whom you haven't technically met yet.

"Duplication Paradox": This one's a doosey It happens when you interrupt the past and thus create a duplicate of yourself. An example of this would be to stop yourself from traveling through time. Since you didn't travel through time, the version of you that stopped you from time traveling shouldn't exist, but using the "Transit Displacement Paradox," there is no paradox and you don't vanish until you return to your present time.

"Final Paradox": The paradox that in changing history that will prevent time travel from being invented.

There's some others but I can't recall them at this time.

I have made a prototype "Paradox Simulator" but as of this moment, it is only in a beta stage. It runs in a DOS window, and is a bit clunky, but I one day hope to do it in either 3D or at the very least in 2D. Basically all this does is allow you to move a small circle in an enclosed rectangle, and travel to any time you want. "Time" is indicated by integer numbers. So you start off at 0 (zero) and can go to any number above that... 234, 5, 42, etc. and back again. Give it a try. You'll get a sense of deja vu from playing it once you start noticing that there are 20 different versions of yourself in the same space at once. And I haven't really programmed it to do anything when you bump into your past self other than destroy the universe
Make sure it's in its own folder, because it'll create about 20 text files used to record player movement and it's a pain to have to find them in a bunch of other files if you didn't put the program into its own folder.

http://formatted.homestead.com/files/paradox.zip

[Herbert1405241469 0]

Just resurrecting an old topic. I've just finished a book titled: "Time: A Traveller's Guide"Very informative.Apparently, the "best" way to efficiently time travel without having to break light speed barriers or bothering with black holes is to find a freakingly huge cylinder and spin around on that for a bit to tilt your light cones in such a way that they tip back towards the past. You can only travel to a point back to which the cylinder was created.So now I have to work all these physics formulas out and see if I can't come up with some sort of possible fictional device that will work in a time travel simulator

[Quatrux 4]

the game I really remember well and it involves time travelling, it is (now kind of old games, released in 1994) Labyrinth of Time, the puzzle I needed to solve through the game was so great, playing it long time ago I just couldn't stop until i finished, i finished it three times, but the last time I played it, I knew all the riddles and etc. and I finished it in 25 minutes it is similar to Myst

[Herbert1405241469 0]

Bought Chrono Cross a couple days ago, the sequel to Chrono Trigger. So far it's pretty good! Took me awhile to get used to those old PSX graphics but overall I'm loving it. I can already tell I'm going to put in a lot more time into this than I did with Chrono Trigger (which I beat btw ) because I've been on it for 11 or so hours and I'm not even on disc 2 yet Highly recommended for any Chrono Trigger fans. It takes some getting used to, but it's worth the effort!