Hmm yea this idea would be intresting in combination with my Memento style story (see thread with momento in name ). You could make it that the player has the possiblity if addressing a old situation when faced with a current one. For example, the player fights the last boss and the boss is using his girlfriend, who he left behind earlier in the game, as a hostage. You could then go back in time and instead of leaving her, you take her with you. But then again thats like allowing the player to go back and erase a mistake to make the current battle/event easier. I''ll post later, right now I have no ideas.

Maybe you could do certain things twice. For instance, the first time through you fail to save the girl, and she dies, but you make a knife out of her femur, and then go back in time and save her with the knife. How romantic is that?

The idea of going through repeatedly and having a slightly different loadout each time is actually pretty cool. It''s like in Majora''s Mask, where you have to go through those three days again and again in order to get the job done. Maybe every time you finish the game and get a (progressively better) ending, you get a handful of new equipment, and can then teleport back to the beginning with that gear, and try again. Depending on what you bring back with you, you can do different things, and earn a different ending or get the same ending but unlock different equipment, so you play the same time-span, but there are different paths to take, and you have to carefully choose what to bring with you each time.

Say you can take five things with you every time you go back. There are twenty different objects to choose from, depending on which ones you manage to unlock, etc. I can''t remember the formula for calculating how many different loadouts are available, but you get the idea. But it''s more complex than that, because if you bring a rope, a pistol, a shovel, a spear and a screwdriver with you, you might be able to get to the sword, the axe, the snowshoes and the sunglasses by using them in combination. So there would be an opportunity to change your gear in the course of the game, but you''d need certain things at certain times to make it work, so the starting gear would be essential.

The design would be crazy complex, but it would make for awesome replay value. Not much multiplayer, though.

For another good alternate universes time travel story, track down "Elsewhen" by Robert Heinlein. It''s a short story, and I found it in "Assignment in Eternity", a collection of four different short works by the same author. It''s neat, if a little too "open" for any kind of free-form game, and might be a good source of inspiration.