Physics

We're All Plain! 2 SE is a little level-based Flash puzzler created for the Global Game Jam. On each level, there are an array of colored orbs. They're on springs; you can pull one back and let it go. If it intercepts an orb of the complementary color (red/gree, blue/orange, purple/yellow), both turn white. To clear the level, you must turn all orbs white.

In addition, banging an orb into a non-complementary color changes the target into the intermediate color (e.g., banging blue into red turns the red orb purple). At higher levels, the springs have limited pull-back, so quite often you cannot change to white immediately -- instead, you must manipulate the orbs, changing to intermediate colors to establish an array that can then be turned white.

The resulting puzzles are actually quite challenging, given the simplicity of the underlying scheme. Graphic designers, to whom the color wheel is second nature, will doubtless find it easier than I, of course.

Osmos is a game that you are designed to like. Sure, it's designed for you to like it, but you are also designed to like this game. And by designed, I mean intentionally by a vengeful Christian god, not in a stochastic evolutionary sense. This game, with its celestial motes harmonizing around the vacuum, slurping each other up, mirrors the precise neurological feedback loops of brain cells congealing electrical signal spikes. The very chemistry of fun is embedded into these floating dynamics, and it's a floating world. You might as well become huge.

You play a mote, an amoeba-type entity, that gets bigger when it contacts smaller entities and smaller when it contacts bigger entities. You can propel yourself by shooting off a tiny portion of your mass with a single mouse-click. Like the cthonic god of Paul Czege's tabletop RPG, Acts of Evil who turns out to be a single powerful microbe predating billions of smaller microbes in antediluvian seas, you are trying to get huge. It's a primal deal, survival of the fittest (or is it fattest? Just going by the current geopolitical benchmark. I mean, what is Thanksgiving about anyway?). Like corporations merging and aquiring until they turn into a bloated parasite like Activision Blizzard, like accounts ripping each other off over a stock exchange, like posturing teenagers drinking beer and licking each others faces, this is evolution or some grotesque approximation. But unlike the cluster-fuck we call reality, this game has charm, it's pure, it's serene. Zen meets billiards meets libido. It's like splitting a doobie with the unbearable lightness of being.

Aesthetically the game is a knock-out, Eddy's background is in "technical art" which is a catch-all to describe everything from light filters to shaders to procedural animation, and this game has all that stuff. I'm a 2d purist and for this scale of a team, you would probably not get such a fine sense of awe, contiguity and most importantly, shininess if they tried to make a 3d take on the same concept. The music tracks all have a kind of groovy Brian Eno feel, like Spore was going for, and its generic qualities are offset by the absolute appropriateness of the genre to this gameplay. One commenter on TIGSource, (which I believe stands for "Trolls In Games Source", Rinku actually banned the word "pretentious" from being posted in comments there) had noted that like the holocaust or the dramas of homosexuals being Oscar bait, amorphous floating blobs with a physics engine are IGF Award Bait. I reckon that troll had a point, and after all, what are trolls for besides brewing regeneration potions from samples of their nanotech-like skin? However I have to defend it, this game is as cohesive as the congealed lipid/water complexes that populate it, its aesthetic is beautifully understated, it's the music of the spheres reconciled with the rhythms of evolutionary biology.

The gameplay in the demo, linked here, gives you the basic gist, the gentle hook, but the variations in the full version are sublime in their nuance. I know this review is getting way to laudatory, so lets break it down in practical terms. You've got three threads of gameplay: ambient settings where you have to puzzle your way from speck-hood to being the biggest, contest levels where you have to rush to become bigger before the already larger motes dominate the field, and physics oriented levels where you have to snipe orbits and other tomfoolery. Each has a different bent and subdivides into mechanical variations, and whats best, the structure is non-linear, so if you're looking for fiero you'll find it, it you want to chillax with some paidic puzzle-solving at a slow pace, as I do, you can just park yourself on that. The alt-Z key allows you to reconfigure the level in a randomized fashion, so maybe we are talking more evolutionary stochasticism here rather than divine intervention, but the replay you get from that is worth the price of admission. My main criticism, and this is a minor one, is that you have to push alt-r to restart or alt-z to scramble, for an otherwise mouse-based game the mapping of complex keyboard inputs to these purposes is unwieldy.

Whether you're a high powered business mote or a lowly student mote, you will enjoy this game and find it soothing from your daily struggles with all the other motes in your local petri dish. And maybe, just maybe, you'll become more humble from the exercise, because after all, does it really matter if you're 100 or 1000 times bigger than the average mote? You're still just an amoeba in the sea.

Mi is an excellent, minimalist puzzler with wholly original gameplay. Each level, you right-click to launch your soap bubble; elsewhere on the level is an exit. (In some, multiple soap bubbles launch simultaneously, and must be guided to different exits.) Rotating gears must be avoided; they pop you like the soap bubble you are.

From Facundo Dominguez, an Uruguayan programmer who was also involved in infrastructure programming for Storytron, we get Space Junk, a very slick little physics-puzzler based where limited fuel, gravitational pulls, and patience are your primary resources. Your mission is to collect the vast amount of junk that has been left around the solar system, surely the side-effect of druken space rednecks driving their fusion-powered Ford space-trucks with reckless abandon, tossing beer cans out the airlock and supplementing asteroid belts with empty cigarette packs. You can pivot and fire off your rocket fuel to build velocity in a particular direction, Lunar Lander style.

Flashbang is back with a flash and a bang, the staple physics-based viscerality, and the staple removing dialectic of destruction vs. capitulation. Instead of being Taurus trying your hand at entreprenuership, you´re a lazy entitlement-jockey trying to do the bare minimum to get through the day while collecting guaranteed pay. Your job is to man a crane, though man-handling it is more accurate. The controls, like those of Minotaur In A China Shop, are intentionally difficult. There´s an inherent delta in where you move the mouse and how the crane follows, and they tuned the gamma up real high, it makes running in the original Super Mario Bros. feel like walking in The Legend of Zelda, by comparison. This sloppiness is amplified by the inability to directly control the height of the crane hook. There´s something in the noise.

Vortex is a traditional puzzle-style game with some interesting use of Newtonian mechanics. As in many puzzlers, in each level you have to get from point A to point B. Here, however, you do not move the item directly, but instead place gravity wells and repulsors at various points in the screen, then hit the "start" button to see what impact they have on the item you need to move.

When Tim Leary died, his last words were "why not?" This game is basically an expression of that. Total insanity giving way to refreshing mechanics and surprisingly deep arcade gameplay. See, you´re a garden gnome, or maybe a building, and you use tether physics in conjunction with left/right movement to knock these little bastard Christmas elves off of you. If one can climb up and get in your chimney, like a Santa of doom, then you lose. Each wave gets more crazy and loaded with elves, then they get the flying sleighs out and the black cats you never know quite what to do with. Then there´s this guy´s face popping up in moments of hysteria to reward you with a bonus token and a perpendicular sound effect. All in all, a wholly aesthetic mosh.

IncrediBots is obviously influenced by The Incredible Machine, but equally, is an attempt to create a digital version of a construction set toy -- a set of tools that allow users to create a wide variety of objects in a freeform (or as we say in digital games, sandbox) way.

I designed Vector 3 back in 1979, and am releasing it here for free under a Creative Commons "attribution non-commercial" license. Actually, I've made some fairly substantial changes to the game.

Vector 3 is a 3D space combat board game; its virtue is that players learn the essentials of vector arithmetic and Newtonian mechanics by playing. On a number of occasions, people have told me they learned more about this from the game than from lecture courses. I could see using it in the context of a high-school math or physics course.

09 IGF Winner for "Vision"

Osmos, one of this year's , is sort of the anti-Asteroids. Like Asteroids, you control an entity moving per Newtonian physics, with the ability to accelerate in arbitrary directions; unlike Asteroids your objective isn't to shoot at and disintegrate other floating objects, but instead to intercept and absorb them.