This is what you look like right now. Yeah yeah, I know you have no idea what this game is..
Back to the Future theme (For lack of in-game music) (Hosted by Kehuan.net)
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Yeah, you’re all like OMGWTFhuh, right? Ok. Time Slip was one of those shareware kinds of deals. If you’ve ever owned anything with a floppy disc drive, you’ll know what I mean. Those quirky little games made by bedroom developers, with strange quirky sound effects and poor graphics. They possess a kind of charm about them that other games lack.
Time Slip was such as game, for Sony’s “Net Yaroze” movement in the late 1990’s. Net Yaroze was a modified Playstation bedroom coders could purchase for around £550. Developers could create games for the system, however distribution was an issue, as there was no means of mass distribution. Today, Microsoft offer a solution through their “Indie Games” movement, powered by the XNA SDK, however back in the days of Net Yaroze, your best bet was to impress the guys over at the Official Playstation Magazine to publish your game on their demo-disc.
Net Yaroze was Playstation produced for hobbyist coders and students. Todays equivilant would be XNA for Xbox 360.
Time Slip at first appears like a fairly innocent platforming game. Collect all the coins, then head to the goal. But the moment the first minute of the game is over, you can just feel things are going to become very very twisted. In the style of LOST Season 5, every 60 seconds, you slip backwards in time, thus creating a multiple version of you. You must play the level, anticipating what your future self might want and need to do, so you’ll spend a bunch of time at first standing on switches, in order to allow your future self to pass through various passages and areas.
It all sounds fun, but theres a terrible, twisted danger. If you interact in your future self in any way whatsoever, if you touch him, shoot him, or if he shoots you; then you have created a catastrophic time paradox, and the universe disintegrates all around you. This is seriously deep shit. The longer you stay in a level, the far more unstable the world becomes, simply by your presence. While games such as Braid have come out in recent years, building their gameplay along the same concept, Time Slip takes time travel in gaming to an extent that messes with your head, and provokes some profound questions. This game is chaos theory, the butterfly effect, for dummies.
YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS ARE DEAD. GAME OVER.
Shuggy (AKA Time Slip Redux), coming to Xbox Live Arcade... someday
To think, if you were to go backwards in time, 10 years, even if you just stood in the middle of a town, people would glance, pause for a split second to think, and continue their day.. but that change, in any circumstance, ripples through time, like an unstoppable avalanche caused by a single shift of snow. People you know to have been killed in accidents in those past ten years arn’t killed. Children you know to have been born in those past ten year’s arn’t… the world is entirely differnt.
Ugh, screw trying to explain this shit.. just watch this video and it’ll all suddenly make sense..
David Johnston continues to make independent games under the alias, “Smudged Cat Games”. He is now incorporating the concept of Time Slip into a full Xbox Live Arcade title, called “Shuggy”.
Search for Official UK Playstation Magazine Demo-Disc 48 on eBay
Time Slip (C) David Johnston and Mike Goatly
