Physics

Do you remember the last time you fully geeked out? You are about to. Universe Sandbox takes the joyous freeplay of Powder and such into 3D. Astronomical scales are laid out for you with a fully zooming and rotatable camera, trails tie knots and stream like ribbons, light waves pulsate at remarkably slow speeds, time is at your command. You can throw a star through the asteroid belt and see what happens. It brings out the awed child in all of us.

Jimmy's Lost His Toilet Paper, another excellent quick little game from Petri Purho, is a puzzle platformer with a novel gameplay idea: the goal isn't so much traversing the level (or avoiding enemies) as rolling up your toilet paper. That is, you begin at left, the exit is at right somewhere, and between the two is draped a string of toilet paper. The puzzle solving is in figuring out how to get your toilet paper rolled up, untangling it as necessary, and looping up, over, and around obstacles as may be.

Relativistic Asteroids is just Asteroids -- but with (some) relativistic effects added -- specifically, length contraction and time dilation.

As your ship accelerates, the little triangle that represents it visibly shortens (length contraction), and if you rotate, contraction is retained in the direction of motion, but not the others.

Time dilation isn't particularly notable--except that your bullets travel a shorter distance (when fired in the direction of motion), presumably because, in their frame they "expire" more quickly relative to the reference frame.

Sumotori Dreams is a) a goofy but minor little game that's fun to watch but not precisely fun to play, b) an impressive physics implementation in very tight form, c) an illustration of why the demoscene is still relevant: Take your pick.

H-Craft Championship looks surprisingly good for an indie racing game--after all, major publishers spend millions polishing the graphics for games of this type, and its impressive that a small team was able to produce something that looks so nice.

It's science fictional, in that the racing vehicles are hovercraft that apparently tool along great superhighways in the sky. Also apparently, in the future, road safety is not a major concern of the authorities--perhaps the world is overpopulated and they want people to plummet to their deaths--so that failure in steering doesn't mean, as in other games, that you go off road and lose speed, but instead lose the game.

Penumbra is the only adventure game in which you play an ostrich.

More specifically, you play a terrified but not terribly sane mathematician descending into the depths of an abandoned mineshaft-turned-military-base. And unlike most adventure games, this one is all about the atmosphere rather than the puzzles.

Although the gameplay is flat and the puzzles are simple, the ambiance is spectacular. The graphics, sounds, level design -- it's all very solid and frightening. This is one of those rare games that will put you in a cold sweat even if you play it on a laptop at a picnic.

Slamdance Guerilla Games Festival Finalist
IGF Finalist for Design Innovation

One phrase we love to use but don't often get to is: You have never seen a game like this before. Yea Toribash.

In Toribash, you control a jointed 3D model. You select a joint, and tell it how to move. When you've issued your instructions, you advance the game, one or more frames at a time--and when you want to change the motion of your character, you change the forces at various joints.

Stoked Rider is a snowboarding game with realistic physics (using Ageia's PhysX engine)--including fluid simulation and avalanches. You roam over a huge space--64 square kilometers of procedurally-created Alaskan moutains. No ski slopes, in other words--just you and the mountain.

2005 IGF Finalist

Okay, so by now everyone is familiar with the interface used in virtually every bowling or golf game, right? Select direction and power, then trigger, and see where your shot goes.

RocketBowl uses the same interface, but this is a far different experience from your usual game. It's played not in a traditional bowling alley, but on a 3D modelled landscape with hills, valleys, obstacles and so on--more like minigolf, in other words, except that you're not trying to get the ball into a hole, but to knock down pins. And the physics engine nicely governs how slopes change the direction of your ball as it rolls.

It's hard to evaluate Gumboy Crazy Adventures without comparison to games such as LocoRoco, Gish, Wik, and even Eets, as the similarities are apparent. Nonetheless, it stands on its own as a unique title, a refreshingly challenging yet quirky sidescroller set in a fanciful, fairy-tale world. Crazy Adventures indeed!