"Back to the Future Day" is rapidly approaching.

This fall, expect to see an onslaught of social media posts about how scientists and engineers have failed us because they haven't invented hover boards, self-drying clothes, holographic sharks, or flying cars. These sorts of Back to the Future memes have been showing up on social media every October for the past few years, often with the dates misquoted. These posts also tend to lament the lack of the nifty technologies showcased in Back to the Future.

And it isn't just Back to the Future that makes people get all nostalgic for the science fiction technology of yesteryear. At the turn of the century, people also bemoaned the huge gap between the manned spaceflight program depicted in Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of Arthur Clark's classic novel 2001: A Space Odyssey. We also don't have food in the form of pills, or robot butlers, or lightsabers, or holodecks, or wrist phones either. Oh wait, we do have wrist phones, so we can check that one off the list.

But maybe the tech that we do have is actually better than what is depicted in contemporary science fiction movies.

Here's what bothers me: the same people who use their smart phones to post these "Back to the Future Day" memes to Facebook, and demand that scientists get off their lazy butts and build a working hoverboard, often take the technology that we do have for granted...

This review is an extension of a review of Part 1, originally published 02/22/2011 on Game Observer (now defunct as of 05/13/2014). It has been republished here for archival purposes, and updated to take Parts 2-5 into consideration. The final score of the game has changed since the original publication.

The short length of Back to the Future: The Game - Episode One is indicative of the game’s episodic nature, but what it offers is very respectful of the source material.

TellTale games has crafted themselves a wonderful little piece of fan service in Back to the Future: The Game. The game really does feel like a labor of love, as the developers clearly put a lot of time and effort into getting the details right and being as respectful to the source material as they could. Characters, environments, and props all look exactly as you’d expect them to (within the style of animation used), and the voices are mostly spot-on. The voice of Marty is replicated by the fantastic Marty McFly impressionist AJ LoCascio, Christopher Lloyd himself was tapped to return as Doc Emmett Brown, and the supporting cast all do an excellent job. Except for Biff. Biff didn’t sound quite right. At least not to me. This game will no doubt draw in any Back to the Future fan right from its opening moments, in which it replicates Doc Brown’s unveiling of the time machine and the first time travel experiment.

I recently discussed some the problems inherent to time travel in works of fiction. Most notably, the paradoxes contained in the Terminator and Back to the Future movies. But now I want to take a step back and look at time itself.

Does "time" even exist?

The standard notion of time is that it is a fourth dimension just as fundamental and intrinsic to the universe as the three spatial dimensions of length, width, and height.

But the truth is: time is just an abstraction of the human imagination. It is a convenient construct that we use to explain relationships between things in our universe. Like motion, time does not exist without the objects that we use as a frame of reference for measuring it.

Time is scientifically defined as a relationship to the rate of decay of a radioactive caesium atom. It is also often linked with the speed of light, which is often seen as a “cosmic speed limit”.

But is this view of time really necessary? Is time truly a fundamental property of our universe?

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning”
   - Werner Heisenberg, father of quantum physics.

Time travel is a difficult subject. It also happens to be a very popular subject of many stories in books, television, movies, video games, and so on. But human kind's limited understanding of the workings of time and the possibility of time travel (especially the limited understanding of the casual book reader, movie viewer, or video game player) leads to depictions of this subject being wrought with logical inconsistencies, paradoxes, and plot holes.

One of the most common problems with time travel stories is the creation of paradoxes. Of these, some of the most common paradoxes are the "predestination paradox", the "bootstrap paradox", and the "grandfather paradox" (or the "reverse grandfather" paradox). You're probably familiar with all of these, but you may not know them by name, so I'll take a moment to define them for you:

I recently had the misfortune of needing to send my PS3 into Sony for servicing. Something was wrong with the graphics card and was creating very unpleasant graphical artifacts and texture issues on most of my games. EA Sports games such as Madden and NCAA were very badly affected. Fallout New Vegas would sometimes go completely black on me. Metal Gear Solid 4 saw some very irritating texture pop-ins and coloration issues. Even the Back to the Future downloadable game from the PSN was suffering from similar problems...

Sony's customer service is horrible. Not the service. Just the policies, the way that the hardware is configured, and the lack of respect that the whole process has for the consumer. I don't understand how they are still in business when repairing a $600 piece of hardware goes something like this:

"Thank you for calling Sony Customer Support. Oh, you're PS3 broke. Well that's too bad. Go ahead and back up your hard drive even though none of it can be restored onto a replacement system anyway. Pay us $130. And then send the system in. If we feel like fixing it, we will. But we probably won't, cuz that would require, like, you know, work. So we'll send you a replacement and inconvenience you even more by making it impossible for you to restore your save files and downloadable content. Thank you and have a nice day. Or a shitty day. Whatever."