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.
The game-like app comes with a set of "Fun Things To Do" which unfortunately does not include cocaine. Among them, creating a perpetual motion machine of moons orbiting the earth (which is a great demonstration of the cusp-of-complexity principle), crashing the Death Star into Endor, and smashing a bloc of moons like a billards deck. In the tradition of great indie games, some of the most charming things about Universe Sandbox are its bugs, which are actually just you tearing the system apart with outrageous variables. For example, speeding up time causes the physics calculations to lag behind the spatial adjustments, orbits flinging out of whack with cartoon-like kineticism, and you can put the thing to the brink of crashing. You could say the time-distortion effect is the simulation taking into account the computational fabric of the universe -- think about that next time you're stoned.
There's a lot more that could be done with this: galaxies, supersymmetry, gods with constrained abilities to warp gravity and shatter constellations, fractal multiverses triggered by chain reactions of black holes. But hey, I'll take it.
Hi, I really like your take
Hi, I really like your take on games and I've learned a lot about titles I haven't heard about and the community that makes them from your reviews, but could you please leave out the drug references?
Druqks
Also, could you please not ever reference anything that conflicts with my non-Copernican view of the solar system? I like reading things here, but intensely dislike it when someone mentions anything that I disagree with. Please delete this post.
"It's a fun thing to do." is
"It's a fun thing to do." is a reference to a classic Colbert moment, where interviewing Rep. Robert Wexler the host coaxed the politician into making the statement "I like cocaine because it's a fun thing to do."
So I was making a reference to that show there, not claiming that cocaine is actually a fun thing to do (it is until it isn't, much like a securities bubble).
The "next time you're stoned" line is an idiom.
I'll try to tone it down in the future, but I'm addicted to drug references.
Here's that clip: http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/videos.jhtml?videoId=72021