List With a Twist: Stop the clock – the dumbest things games do with time

Posted February 19, 2011 by Matthew Lee.

Videogames do quite a few stupid things we take for granted because, well, they don’t get in the way of our enjoyment. But that doesn’t make them any less idiotic. One of the most common has got to be how they play around with time – speeding it up and slowing it down so often if it happened in real life we’d think we were going round the twist. So here are some of the worst offenders: the five most ridiculous abuses of time in videogames.

1: Cities in Motion

Oh, Cities in Motion. I do love you. You know that, right? But my goodness, you’re a bit daft sometimes, no? To be fair to developers Colossal Order they clearly weren’t trying to produce a game with a realistic twenty-four hour clock, but their sprawling transport sim can’t help but seem really silly every now and then.

I know one person in-game is not meant to be the exact equivalent of one person in real life. Virtual Berlin only has a population in the tens of thousands, rather than several million. But still, I watch the game world ticking over, see people waiting at a bus stop, check the clock and realise it’s telling me they’ve been there for days.

Personally if a bus takes more than half an hour I usually walk it, but seeing these hardy specimens tough it out for ninety-six hours or more, apparently without food or water, makes me feel profoundly inadequate. Next time I’m headed into town I’ll pack a tent or something, just in case.

2: Bully (a.k.a. Canis Canem Edit)

So Bully’s Jimmy Hopkins is the man, right? The angry young man, at least. His parents (mother and new stepdad) don’t seem to care much about him, packing him off to boarding school without so much as a backwards glance. Every clique in Bullworth Academy wants to either belittle him or stamp on his head. The teachers want him to knuckle under no matter how bad things get.

But Jimmy’s a scrapper, standing up to anyone and everyone, proving quite the knight in shining (well, grubby) armour… other than one puzzling weakness. Tell me again why, if you’re still outside in the small hours of the morning, the kid simply collapses unconscious?

I’m not sure it’s ever stated how old any of the protagonists are, but when I was in my mid-teens I was pulling all-nighters at goth clubs, fuelled by cheap red wine and way too much caffeine, and going twenty-four hours without sleep didn’t strike me as that much of an effort. Never mind the lack of violence: this strikes me as far more unrealistic, to be honest.

3: Final Fantasy X

A time limit’s a tricky thing to implement in a longer, more freeform game, since you run the risk some players will fail to meet it, then get angry at something they don’t believe was their fault.

So I’m not too bothered RPGs or JRPGs in particular frequently bandy around the idea terrible things are about to happen in a matter of days, even hours, then don’t really act as if that’s the case. But one thing that really turned me off FFX was the way that, with the world supposedly about to end, no-one batted an eye when I went off to play a few games of turn-based underwater basketball.

I mean, you’d think at least one of my party would have been a bit concerned, right? But no. Nor do the other team seem too upset. Play all the blitzball you want! We’ll just… sit here in the dressing room, twiddling our thumbs, wondering if the apocalypse is going to hurt that much.

4: Fighting games (well, quite a few of them)

Again, I know fighting games are the way they are out of necessity, at least in part. And some do provide a reason why the cast are squaring off to kick seven bells out of each other, however flimsy those reasons are. But some seem to obsess so much over setting and character they forget one little thing that seems more incongruous to me than any nonsense in the script.

Why do rounds last for any set time at all? Who’s supposed to have decided this? (Other than the player, obviously.) It’s weird enough the fighters can just wait for starter’s orders when their pride, their loved ones or the fate of the world’s at stake, but when there’s no announcer around it just seems that much stranger.

They come to blows on some unspoken signal, and after a couple of minutes if neither have gone down the weaker just hits the floor and throws a hissy fit? If this is the warrior’s way, you can keep it, thanks.

5: Prince of Persia (original trilogy)

Without the Dagger of Time, Prince of Persia’s prince would be royally screwed. I mean, that’s the whole point of the story. The ability to rewind time at will, provided he’s got the thing charged up, is pretty much essential to putting his father’s desert kingdom back in order (is it even possible to beat the game without it?).

But think about this – when he travels back a few seconds, the prince is the only one who knows what just happened. And to all intents and purposes that seems to include his own painful death, if he’s correcting a particularly bad mistake.

I mean, look at Bill Murray in Groundhog Day – clearly you can’t live through an agonizing demise over and over and over again without turning into an emotional wreck with a precarious grip on sanity. Yet the prince is always up for a sarcastic quip to the audience as if none of it bothers him in the slightest.