Whenever Sony patents its (often wacky) ideas, the news spreads fast, even though we rarely see these concepts become a reality. However, this latest patent to make headlines (as spotted by eXputer), actually sounds like something Sony could push ahead with. The documents reveal a kind of ‘replay’ system, which would basically allow players to jump back to various points in a game’s campaign and play through them again.

When you stop to think about it, this could be incredibly useful. We all have favourite moments in the games we play — like a specific mission or boss fight — and so being able to replay those sections with minimal fuss sounds great. In theory, you wouldn’t need to start a whole new run in order to experience those high points again.

There is a bit of a catch, though. The patent mentions the necessity of “trigger points” — markers at certain points in the game that would need be manually flagged by developers. In other words, this replay feature wouldn’t just let you rewind to any point at any time. With that in mind, it sounds like this feature would probably have to be spearheaded by the likes of PlayStation Studios. If it proved to be popular, maybe we’d see third party devs pick it up as well.

Obviously all of this sounds relatively easy on paper, but we’re sure that the implementation of such a system would require a lot of work. Still, the fact that Sony’s actively looking into this sort of thing is interesting.

What do you make of this patent? Does it sound cool, and would you use it?