As I'm sure you know, A Crack in Time opens with Clank still robot-napped by the Zoni, the blue-eyed race that stole the sidekick away in Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. Now, the ghostly robots are keeping Clank in the Great Clock, a device out in space that has a say in the universe's internal clock. Stranded here, Clank has befriended a robot named Sigmund and is learning the ways of the Chronoscepter. This silver scepter with a crazy top gives Clank the ability to hurl bubbles that slow down time for everything inside the now present sphere. Want to bring a group of enemies to a crawl or slowdown a deathtrap? Then, you're going to make fast friends with the Chronoscepter.
This new device was key to solving the puzzles Sony dropped in my lap this evening. See, whereas the Ratchet stuff is your typical blasting and platforming, Clank's missions are going to challenge you to solve more and more complex, time-based riddles. For this demo, Sigmund introduced Clank and I to Time Pads. A blue pad and a green pad, these devices record your movements for about a minute or until you tell them to stop and then replay the recordings so that a Clank ghost runs out and does whatever you just did.
Confused?
The first example was simple enough. I had the time pads at my feet, a red button in the center of the room, and a closed door at the other end. When Clank stepped on the red button, the door would open, but it would slam shut as soon as he stepped off of it. So, I stepped onto the blue pad, began recording -- which tossed the red dot and "REC" on the screen that you'd expect to find on your camcorder -- and ran to the red button. I stopped the recording, walked to the green pad, and began recording again. The blue ghost took off to the red button, I ran to the door, the ghost hit the red button, and I walked through the now open door to the other side.
Sounds easy, right? Well, the first couple of times were, but then the game started tossing in spinning, electrified deathtraps where Clank had to run out and hurl a ball of Chronoscepter stopping power. The ghost does the exact same thing so that the second Clank could run out, stand on the no-longer-electrified platform, and deactivate the next one. Somewhere in there was a red button to activate, but the final puzzle broke my head and I can't seem to recall where the red button in this puzzle was.
See, the last puzzle was a noodle-scratcher. I'm sure some kids are wired for this stuff, but it took PlayStation Blog guru Jeff Rubenstein and I a few cracks to figure out what we had to have shiny Clank do. We had to get a ghost up a moving platform and over to a button while we stood on a button and then toss a time ball on some spinning stuff but make sure we were standing on the button so the ghost got up there without falling but still move forward -- BRAIN ANEURYSM.
