Tag: PHYSICS

Rotate and Roll is a game about balls. However, it can rapidly turn into a game about balls plummeting towards inevitable doom, unless you play it wisely. The balls in question are on a plank. Sometimes it's just one lonely ball per level, and sometimes there are as many as four. When you press the arrow keys, the entire level rotates. Obviously, the board tilts, and the ball starts rolling. If ...

Fluid Water Simulation is like one of those executive desk toys. There are no levels, there's no goal, and you can't win. What you can do, though, is control approximately 5,500 particles of water, oil, or foam. You can draw walls, sketch air emitters (which create turbulence in the water), or draw very powerful "wind" with your mouse. What you see on the screenshot is wind blowing in from the ...

When I was a kid, I used to love LEGOs. Building intricate systems out of bricks is just a lot of fun. Isoball 2 is a lovely time-waster that captures some of that fun. There's a glass ball in the wall, and when you hit Start, that ball is released. It has to get to the hole in the floor (on the left side of the screenshot). The ball can't fall too hard on the floor. In fact, it can't fall at ...

Ricochet Kills 2 is a splendidly violent physics-based puzzle game. In the game, you need to kill all the "bad guys" on the screen in each level. Nobody moves, including you, and the only way to do them in is to shoot them directly, ricochet a shot off of something else, or influence an object to fall on or explode near them. The early levels of the game are very easy, and in my opinion, the game ...

When Lee posted about Fantastic Contraption back in 2008, I literally lost multiple days playing through it, mastering it, and then retrying levels in interesting and creative ways. It was, and still is, one of my all-time favorite physics-based games. So I was delighted today when a friend sent me a simple link over IM, and when I clicked it to find out what it was, I was greeted with its sequel, ...

If you hadn't gathered, today is a slow news day -- and when there's nothing to write about, the first thing we do, here in the Download Squad bunker, is play some games. It's a hard life, but someone's gotta do it. First up today is Ragdoll Cannon 3. As you can imagine, there are two (very successful) earlier versions, but #3, in my opinion, is the best yet. It's not hard -- in fact it's ...

Castle Smasher is not side-scrolling in the normal sense of the word; your character actually doesn't move at all. Rather, you stand on the left side of the screen manning a medieval trebuchet. There's a castle on the right, which you have to obliterate using the trebuchet. Using the mouse you can raise and lower the trebuchet and control its force. The catch is that while you're doing that, you ...

I'm a sucker for physics-based time waster games. Cover Orange is one that's new to me, and it's unique in that the goal is to protect your little orange and green pumpkins (or are they apples?) from acid rain. You can't move or control your little guys. Instead, you need to creatively place objects within each level to protect them. Sometimes this just means building a shelter for them, but more ...

Shuriken Showdown is a classic shooting physics game, where the object is to hit various targets. In this case, you must hit all of the targets first, clearing them, and then hit the gong. However, you have a limited number of shurikens (ninja stars) with which to do it. There are also other objects that you can hit, such as one that gives you three more shurikens, and others that shoot out ...

You thought GPU-accelerated fonts in Firefox were cool...? Well, Internet Explorer 9 will go one HUGE step further: GPU-accelerated HTML5. Websites will, at long last, be hardware accelerated -- as long as you're using IE9 anyway. I have no idea why we've had to wait quite this long for DirectX utilization in the browser. Zooming, scrolling, physics -- all REALLY fast, really smooth. They ...

Who doesn't love blowing stuff up? It's even better when it's part of a physics puzzle game. Dynamite Blast puts these compelling ingredients together into a fun little game, where the goal is to complete each level's puzzle using only explosives as your tool. Sometimes you're trying to destroy structures, or maybe send a motorcycle flying. Currently I'm stuck on a level where you have to bring ...

I like to think of Clockwork Monster's Blosics as a sort of backwards-Jenga-with-cannonballs. Click in the green circle to "arm" a projectile and hold the button to increase the shot's power. You'll need to use finesse and play your angles well once the game introduces red blocks. Knocking green ones from the platform earns you points, while red ones penalize you. Earn 100 points or more, ...

Paper Cannon is a fairly typical physics-based bomb-shooting cannon game. If you enjoy this sort of game, it has enough charm and challenge to be worth your time; if physics shooting games are not your cup of tea, you'll probably want to take a pass. The goal in Paper Cannon is to kill all of the creepy one-eyed bunnies in each level with the fewest number of shots possible. Thankfully, unlike ...

Dynamic Systems is a physics-based puzzle game. As is common for this type of game, your goal is to get the ball into the goal. In this case the ball is metal, and the goal is a cup. You move certain objects into place and rotate them into the correct orientation to allow the ball to roll, bounce, or otherwise be moved into the cup. Thankfully, unlike most puzzle games, Dynamic Systems offers ...

Icycle is a "capture the stars" style game where you control a naked (yes, naked) character. Instead of stars, your character is trying to collect frozen bubbles. Since he's missing his clothes, and if you ride him into a hazard and he falls off his bike, he freezes, or dies in numerous entertaining ways. While the game play is solid, the physics of the game are pretty limited when compared to ...