Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The joy of Flash games is so often their simplicity. Simple concepts delivered in a quick-n-fun way, to offer a twenty minute lunchtime distraction. Not a word of this applies to IncrediBots. (Apart from “Flash”, “fun” and “a” – so okay, three words apply). This is hardcore.

It’s a remarkably complex mix of mechanics and physics, currently in beta, letting you build and play with vehicles of your own devising, to complete a series of challenges. And it’s capable of so much more than that. It’s too much for my puny brain, but I’m utterly certain that those inclined are going to love it.

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There aren’t enough games in which you’re indestructible. Even in Superman games and Hulk games you’re kept Earthly by health and energy bars. Madness! There’s nothing wrong with a good old power fantasy, but developers seem determined not to indulge us. This webgame does. In Boombot, you can fall down a hole and have to restart the level, but that’s more error than death as such. More importantly, you can’t be killed even by all the explosions in the world. See this?

This does not hurt the Boombot, not one bit. For he is INDESTRUCTIBLE. Read the rest of this entry »

I hated physics more than any other class at school. And not just because of the time my teacher slammed me in the side of the neck with an exercise book, causing me to black out for 3 seconds. It was mostly because my brain seems to have some inherent inability to accommodate the kind of thinking necessary to understand forces and elasticity and so on. Which is annoying, as thanks largely to videogames I now tend to think not ‘physics’ but PHYSICS!

So I recognise that Fantastic Contraption is a thing of brilliance (awful, awful music aside), and I get enormously excited when I manage to bodge together something that works. What I can’t seem to do is plan what should work. Apart from level 5, where my ever-destructive brain correctly surmised that a battering ram was in order. Knocking stuff over is something I do understand.
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Everyone I know who tips me off for great Flash games has been nagging me to play Totem Destroyer. I did, and you know, it just wasn’t for me. I finished it quite quickly, and never really felt the love. However, wiser people did, so I pass it on to you.

It’s from the reliable Armor Games, made by Gabriel Ochsenhofer, and using Erin Catto’s Box2D physics engine, and involves removing blocks from a wobbly tower such that a golden idol doesn’t hit the ground. Remove the required number of blocks and win the level. For me it felt more about quick luck than any great application of skill in a world of physics. But perhaps you will enthuse – play it in your browser here.

It’s interesting (and occasionally horrifying) what you can dig up by typing random things into YouTube. I just discovered the beta test of a physics game, Polluted Planet (danger – initially noisy website), which is about cleaning up a level using oil-on-water type particle interactions. It’s a pretty clever piece of design, even though it locked up my browser a couple of times during play. Everything requires physics to defeat, and the terrain itself has a rubbery, flexible quality to it.

After the jump, the video that led me to it.
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Mr Walaber has recently come to some fame. His gorgeously wobbly JellyCar physics game is now available on the Xbox Live, as part of the XNA doodah (this stands for “XNA’s Not Acronymed”, in a peculiar moment of Microsoft doing a Free Software gag). (Head here and you can play it on your PC). But we’re here today to look at his next game, Gymnast.

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Emil Ernerfeldt is studying at Umeå University in Sweden. For his masters’ thesis project, he’s developed a 2D physics engine, Phun, that’s part toy, part educational medium. He describes it thusly:

“Phun is an educational, entertaining and somewhat addictive piece of software for designing and exploring 2D multi-physics simulations in a cartoony fashion. It is part of our long term mission to bring visual physics based simulation to the masses. The application is developed for Umevatoriet, Umeås new science center, where it will run on a large interactive display, but you can also download it and run it on your own pc.”

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Hold my hand. Squeeze tight. It’s time to open our RPS-approved fairtrade advent calendar. What’s behind the door…

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I feel blessed to have uncovered the perfect salve for my worsening hangover, just as the right time. Splume, a beautiful little puzzle game that I found thanks to the perpetually high-quality bloggery over at IndyGamer, is just the right mixture of increasing challenge and neat design to soothe my poisoned body. It was designed for some game design competition and you have to install their web-browser plug in to play. I have it on reasonable authority that this is an okay thing to do.

So it’s a kind of Tetris-Peggle physics ‘n’ matching game. Eyeballs watch, music plays, things drop and squish. You’ll like it. There’s even a level editor and a bunch of exquisite user-made levels. And there goes my afternoon/evening.

Should note, this is the work of Matthew Wegner who runs the excellent Fun Motion blog, dedicated to physics games. – John

Fun Motion spot this enticing looking physics game. A jelly-based physics game in fact, featuring wobbly cars made of jelly:

Vid 1: (quite short)

Longer, more detailed version if only you would click.
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