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Hourglass: Time Travel In Video Games  When I was 13, one of my
absolute favorite games was Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.
Sands of Time absorbed my life when I first received it. I had
never played the original, but the PlayStation 2 release quickly
became my go-to option when I got home from school every day.
Any whippersnappers reading may not realize what a giant deal
that is, because middle-schoolers don’t have Toonami to come
home to anymore. Anything that could pull me away from my
obsession with Rurouni Kenshin and Yu Yu Hakusho was rare.
Anyway, what really drew me into Sands of Time was its key
gameplay mechanic: time travel. If an enemy was about to finish
me off or I couldn’t make a jump, no problem. The nifty Dagger
of Time allows the player to rewind undesirable events and give
it another go.   Remembering my fondness for this classic
inspired me to look into other uses of time as an ally, foe, or
even a pawn in video games.  T