Physics Games and Physics-Based Game Downloads

(Rate this game! 24 votes, average: 2.46 out of 5)

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Soup du Jour is a small physics game from Digital Eel, an independent developer best known for their Infinite Space games. It’s worth mentioning that, although it’s not a physics game, Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space is a fantastic experience. I highly recommend it. So how does their foray into physics-based gameplay fare? Unfortunately, not as well…

Goals and Controls

Let’s start with the basics: You play Soup du Jour by clicking and dragging on springy physics objects to make matches. This becomes difficult as pieces spawn more quickly, get in the way of each other, and become more chaotic. It’s difficult to make a game about fast/accurate mouse movement. It tends to be a frustrating experience, and Soup du Jour is no exception. I crave some kind of stylus input.

Harsh Pacing

Soup du Jour starts off well. You make a few matches, push some of the ingredients around, and get a sense than you’re interacting in a highly physical environment. But it soon becomes very, very difficult. It’s like all of the thought put into design was brainstorming how to make things more difficult. And they’ve certainly succeeded. A slew of challenges await you: Large pieces, bombs, missiles, and more colors. You’re punished when pieces fall over the edge; a single bomb could knock half of your ingredients out if you aren’t careful.

My personal preference would have been to focus on variation, but along other axes besides difficult. What variations would make the game easier? Or simply different? In the current play experience all of the variations add difficultly, and the variations come pretty quickly and don’t let up. Before too long your defeat is inevitable and it just doesn’t feel very fun. A pacing that oscillated up and down would be more enjoyable. There are very few times where you feel on the brink of reversible defeat. It’s relentless.

(Soup du Jour Game Screenshots)

Worth the $10?

Soup du Jour is priced at a modest $10, which isn’t a bad value for a short play experience. For me, though, it’s a play experience I don’t really want to repeat. It isn’t the kind of game I can enjoy in short bursts. Highly competitive players may enjoy maximizing their score, but personally I’d rather enjoy something a little longer and more forgiving. There’s a free demo, though, so you be the judge!

Download Soup du Jour Demo (5.2 MB)

Or visit the Soup du Jour website for more information. The full version costs $10 USD.

Matthew Wegner is the founder and editor of Fun-Motion, this very site.

(Rate this game! 85 votes, average: 3.35 out of 5)

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And Yet It Moves… is a conceptual game that won the 2007 Independent Games Festival Student Showcase. The first thing you’ll notice is the torn photo art, which is a fantastic way to pretty up the world without having to dedicate serious man-hours to artwork. Unfortunately the look might be my favorite part of the game. There are a lot of good ideas here, but it is quite apparent that it’s still a student project.

Wasted Potential

You’ve got a basic side-scroller with a twist: You can rotate the world around the main character at any moment in the game. Each level is a series of physics puzzles all about manipulating the world’s orientation. Great, but that’s all we really see.

Don’t get me wrong, each new obstacle demonstrates a creative reason to spin, but figuring out that reason in puzzle after puzzle is the entire game. There is no room for experimentation or play with the environment or physics. You never look at a puzzle, know the answer and also think “Oh, this will be fun to try.” Instead your thoughts are “If this takes longer than 60 seconds, it ain’t worth it.”

Crushed, Burned, and Mudered by a Swarm of Bees

There are many ways to die in And Yet It Moves and if you play it, you will surely discover them all for yourself. That’s because each puzzle is incredibly frustrating. They’re not hard to figure out; they’re tough because your little paper man is so easy to kill. He can’t fall more than 15 feet, never seems to get out of the way of boulders and if his hair catches on fire he explodes into pieces. In fact, the game would be much more interesting if you could just fall farther without dying. I kept hoping that sooner or later I’d have to spin the world to complete a clever aerial maneuver or just tip the ground down to fall to my destination instead of running. Well, go ahead and try it. You won’t get far before you’re all splattered on the bedrock.

Chemistry Games?

There is one puzzle that really caught my eye. Your path is blocked by a beehive so you bash two pieces of flint together to light a brush fire. The fire starts far from the nest, but heat rises. You must spread the fire by rotating the world, placing the next fuel source above the flame’s location. Eventually, a long wick of bushes has been burned through and the bees have been smoked out.

I appreciate that these guys managed to use fire as physical fire, not just “hurtful object D.” The idea of it takes physics simulation to another level, more like chemistry simulation. It is a kind of creative attention to detail that too many games lack.

(And Yet It Moves… Game Screenshots)

Worth Checking Out

The guys behind And Yet It Moves are obviously talented, but the game itself is lacking. Every aspect of design seems oversimplified, as if it is still in a development stage and the designers have not yet grasped the game’s possibilities. And Yet It Moves is a great place to start, but they’ll need to be more bold with their next project.

Download And Yet It Moves (12.9 MB Windows, 19.9 MB Mac OS)

Christopher J. Rock is a Flash game developer and writer.

(Rate this game! 70 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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Occasionally, a game just sticks out. Sometimes for it’s cinematic polish, or it’s finely tuned gameplay…but every now and then you happen across a game that’s simply a labor of love - a game that conforms only to the unique creativity of the developers and not to market demands or existing conventions. Golf? (golfquestionmark), despite being a game of golf with standard golf rules, is one such game. Its unique visual style and its unrestricted physics-based movement both create a refreshingly new experience out of a tired old concept.

One Cup, Abstract Minimalism

The first thing to leave an impression is the art direction. The ground is more or less standard golf course stuff, though colored entirely in shades of grey. Each course is contained within a giant black cube with a glowing ceiling. Birds made of single lines fly overhead. Trees litter the grounds, many looking like they belong on the corners of playing cards, others with bursts of solid color which contrast the surroundings, and some which are simply vector outlines off in the distance. Some courses are inhabited by giant, abstract robots (boxes with legs, I suppose) frozen in mid stride to provide obstacles for your golf ball. Player models are brightly colored, low polygon, robots whose heads might be anything from guns to teapots depending on what you’re doing. Your caddy–who doubles as a controllable free camera–is a flying box robot with a respectable face on the front of his rectangular head, though he seems to enjoy his low-polygon grog. The flagpoles at each hole are adorned with a little robot wearing a top hat.

This is a game which celebrates its digital nature, outlining polygons with artistic, surreal pride, rather than trying to fool you with some attempt at realism. It’s classy, silly and atmospheric all at the same time.

A Teaspoon of Physics

None of which would mean a great deal if the game wasn’t fun to play. Thankfully it is, and this fun is complemented by the complete physical freedom the player is given at all times. When taking a shot, you swing your club manually using the mouse. The ball’s path leaves a permanent dotted line in the air, allowing you to analyze the trajectory and find your ball. Rather than simply moving you to the ball, like most golf games do, you have to make your way there yourself. Walking around the courses plays like a standard first person game, although to help speed you on your way, you are given a “rocket sauce” powered golf cart which you can drive around freely, bouncing over hills or flinging yourself off ramps which appear on and around a few courses. The physics engine behind all movement in the game is straightforward yet effective, making cart movement entertainingly bouncy, and ball movement reliable and solid.

Most importantly, the free physical approach does not detract from the depth of traditional golf gameplay. You can select from a complete range of golf clubs, and each acts on the ball differently and as you would expect. At first, you might find the freedom of club swinging a bit loose and uncontrolled, but you will quickly learn to ‘feel’ it, as you would with a real golf club, and you will most certainly improve with a little practice.

(Golf? Game Screenshots)

Stir and Enjoy

Overall, Golf? provides a distinctively unique, and surprisingly polished gameplay experience (especially considering it’s just a beta). Four players can play simultaneously over the internet or a network, but even the solo experience is fun and rewarding. The game has nine holes, and the occasional creative surprise which, when noticed, can put a slightly different spin on gameplay. The game is highly replayable (it gets more fun as you get better), and feels more or less complete in it’s current form, so there’s not much reason not to give it a try. Just ensure your graphics card handles OpenGL comfortably, grab the download, and have a swing.

Download Golf? Public Beta (22 MB)

Or visit the Golf? website for more information.

Ed Harrison is a composer/audio engineer and physics enthusiast.