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GAMING: TURNING BACK TIME

We all wish we could press rewind sometimes. Tom Standage looks at a few video games that make this possible ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Winter 2009 If I could turn back time... It’s a dodgy Cher song, with a video that features a battleship. It’s also a very natural wish. Who has not longed for the ability to press rewind, after blurting out something that should have remained unsaid, or reversing into another car outside the supermarket? Alas, real life does not have a rewind button. But a growing number of video games do. The idea goes back at least as far as “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time”, released in 2003. The prince was armed with a special dagger that could rewind time by as much as ten seconds—very handy if you have just fallen off a crumbling ledge or been dealt a devastating blow during combat. Killing bad guys recharged the dagger’s time-travelling powers. Time travel is central to “Braid”, a gem of a game originally written for the Xbox 360 that is now also available on Mac and Windows (and, as a download, on PlayStation 3). At first glance it looks like a Mario-style platform game, albeit with a distinctive graphical style and a rewind button that puts the on-screen action into reverse. If you miss a jump or fall off a cliff, you can rewind as far as you like and have another go. But things get really clever with the introduction of doors, switches and other things that are unaffected by the rewind button. All sorts of mind-bending time-travel puzzles become possible. It is in driving games that the ability to turn back time really comes into its own. “Full Auto”, a racing-combat hybrid from 2006, pioneered the idea. Last year’s “Grid” had a flashback button that let you try again if you misjudged a corner or crashed into a wall. Codemasters, the company behind “Grid”, then included the same feature in “Dirt 2”, a rally-driving game that came out in September. Rewind also appears in “Forza Motorsport 3”, released in October; it is fast becoming a standard feature of racing games. Rewind is a godsend because making a single slip-up no longer means you have to start the whole race all over again, with a tedious delay while you wait for the game to reload. Hitting a rewind button instead is much quicker, and makes it easier to learn the vagaries of a particular car or track. Purist fans of racing games feel that rewind is a form of cheating, but they don’t have to use it if they don’t want to. Instead of punishing you for making a mistake, rewinding lets you have another try right away. Games are, after all, meant to be fun. (Tom Standage is The Economist's business affairs editor and author of "An Edible History of Humanity". He is the gaming columnist for Intelligent Life.) Picture credit: bogenfreund (via Flickr)