New Ratchet and Clank Game Mechanic Looks Suspiciously Familiar

It seems that developers are taking inspirations from creative minds of the past who dreamed of the future. The new fad in gaming seems to be screwing with the time-space continuum, and completely ignoring chaos theory.

Ars Technica as put up a preview of Ratchet and Clank: A Crack In Time that  outlines some of the new features in this iteration of the series. These new game mechanics, as you may have guess from the game’s title, are centered around manipulating time.  The following is a short description of one of the “new” game mechanics by writer Ben Kuchera; they are called “time pads.”

Even better are the time pads. You stand on one and “record” your actions in time. Then you stand on the other and interact with your past self going through its actions. In the simplest puzzles you stand on a pressure-sensitive switch for yourself so you can walk through a door. In the more intricate puzzles you have to record sections of your performances multiple times in a type of choreographed dance to get to where you’re going, often using the time explosives in multiple ways.

Sound like a familiar type of mechanic? It should, if you listened to any of our PAX talks about the indie game The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom. In P.B. Winterbottom, you hold a button on the controller to record a copy of yourself, either standing still or performing various tasks, in order to solve puzzles (and get pie). If this sounds confusing, check out the official trailer released last year. From the sound of it, the new Ratchet and Clank game uses the exact same mechanic (admittedly with many other new game mechanics) to set the new installment of the game apart from other generic platformers.

I have to laugh a little at Ben’s remarking that this mechanic is “ingenious” since P.B. Winterbottom was utilizing it almost a year ago. Now I know that they probably didn’t borrow the mechanic from P.B. Winterbottom (both games were in development during roughly the same time period) but time travel seems to be the new thing for video games nowadays. While this in itself isn’t too terrible, it’s frustrating to people copying each other’s ideas instead of actually trying something new. I guess it’s better than the “next-gen brown” fad. THE FUTURE IS THE FUTURE OF GAMING!