Idea Info Name: Transfixed Parallel Index: Primary Category: RPG Submitted: 5/24/2003 1:55:33 AM Written By: error404 Game Architecture and Design: A New Edition Book Highly Recommended !

Transfixed Parallel

Story:

A old, wizened man you meet in the street strikes a conversation with you. His gibberish about something called transfixed time goes unnoticed as you gaze into the depths of the smoggy city streets. You soon realize that he has not said a word for the past minute so you look aside to see if he is still there. All you see on the empty park bench is an onyx ring and a note. You open the note, and transcribed in sloppy handwriting is the sentence "iesta leorba soles". You pick up the ring and examine it. You slip it on your finger, figuring the black market will accept it for around 20 quid. As you walk home, something feels portentous. You’re not sure what however. The shadows around you seem to jump at you ominously. Nervously, you rub the ring on your finger. Amazingly, instead of feeling the cool solidity of it, it seems to melt like chocolate underneath your fingertips. You take a more interested glance at it. Inside it’s foggy depth, a figure just like you stares at another onyx ring, and in that other ring, you can just make out another person staring at something on his finger. As you look skyward, you realize the treasury building has disappeared, along with the electric street lamps, and the people you’ve seen meandering through the park. A notice on a billboard near the police station is a clipping from a newspaper. The headline shouts ‘The Twenties are Still Roaring!’. Feverishly, you step inside the station. Absentmindedly, the ring is glanced at, but in the ring, things are different. The first picture has the station as you remember. The second has a strange chrome gleam to it. You step back outside and hold the ring up near the clipping. The first picture loudly proclaims ‘Scientists Find Chemical Malfunction in Siberian Power Plant’, and the second one dictates ‘The End Of The World is Coming!’. You come to realize the horrible truth: You are stuck firmly in the past, and the future of you original present will soon be destroyed!

Gameplay:

As the story reads, a chemical malfunction in a nuclear reactor has doomed the world to a shadowy fate. The only thing liable to stop the meltdown is a chemical that originates in the past, but was destroyed after it was found to be deadly. That chemical, however gone, has records remaining. The point of the game is to maneuver through the past to find how to make the chemical, soar through the present to find how to activate it, and get to the future to stop the meltdown. The game screen remains rather odd. A three-way split is in effect, and the tab button is used to scroll through the time periods, the left being past, the middle, present, and the right, future. There are very simple controls: the keypad to move, F to have an action button, D to stash (keep until next time period), and S to pause/show inventory. When scrolling, say from past to present, the past entirely freezes, allowing quick transfer. Items in the Past or the Present may be used in the Present or Future. Likewise, hints and info from the Future or Present may be used in the Present or Past.