Physics Games and Physics-Based Game Downloads

(Rate this game! 179 votes, average: 3.62 out of 5)

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Well, seven digital children died. At it wasn’t so much a “tragic roller coaster accident” as it was a “highly entertaining physics-based roller coaster game”. Close enough.

Fantasy Roller Coaster is a simple physics game by the master of physics games, Red Lynx Ltd. Red Lynx is all over the place. They call themselves a “a developer and Producer of Interactive Cross-Media Entertainment“. It looks like they do a lot of work-for-hire contract work, but they also have an internal team that cranks out their own games every so often. Primarily they produce the insanely hard Trials series, so Fantasy Roller Coaster is a step in a new direction for them.

(Fantasy Roller Coaster Game Screenshots)

The premise of Fantasy Roller Coaster is simple. You’re the brakeman on a rather psychedelic roller coaster with two options: speed up or slow down. Your coaster is full of tykes along for the ride of their young lives. When you jar their little noggins around they squeal in glee and score heart points. Too fast, though, and you’ll crash. Too slow and you won’t score as many points.

That’s it. The game rewards you by adding or removing cars between stages. If you score well on one of the four levels you’ll add a new car to your coaster. Score especially well and you get two additional cars. Crash early and score poorly and you’ll have one taken away. The result is a feedback cycle–you need to do well on early stages to get more cars to do score more to get more cars, etc…

It is possible to optimize. My early games didn’t score nearly as much as my later games did. My current high score is 214. Think you can beat that? The full version of the game is $14.95 and available at such websites as Miniclip or Arcade Town. The art alone is worth your money–the game’s backgrounds are amazing. There are also several different levels available as free Java versions on different websites.

Fantasy Roller Coaster is a well-executed implementation of a simple but addictive physics game idea. The game weighs in a little light on content at only four stages, though. It’s hard to justify spending $15 on a game that will take five minutes to play through. Still, it’s a great way to kill five minutes at a time, twenty times a day…

Play Fantasy Roller Coaster online (Java) or buy the game at Miniclip or Arcade Town.

(Rate this game! 401 votes, average: 4.07 out of 5)

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Ragdoll physics have been a fascination in video games ever since their inception. There’s something hypnotizing about watching a body flail around. The first ragdoll physics games were little more than tech demos. There were rules and goals attached to them, sure, but the level of player interaction was limited. In recent years, though, developers have become more imaginative the possibilities of a ragdoll-based gameplay.

Ragdoll Masters is a little-known game by Rag Doll Software. The game first launched in May of 2005 and has since received two major updates. Their own description of the title is as follows:

Ragdoll Masters is an experiment in the world of 2D beat ’em’ ups with the use of ragdoll physics. In this game you control a stylized martial arts master, making his way through stronger and stronger opponents with spectacular moves and impressive blows. It features some of the most sophisticated physics ever used in 2D games and plenty of other neat effects.

2D ragdoll-based fighting games have recently been popularized by the much-publicized Rag Doll Kung Fu. While I appreciate the artistic care Mark Healy put into the production of RDKF, I must admit that I had a lot more fun playing Ragdoll Masters.

Ragdoll Masters is more simplistic than RDKF. Control is keyboard-based and limited to the four primary directions. Left and right rotate your character. Up and down trigger impulses in their respective directions. It’s a little clumsy at first, even to the point of flailing, but after a few minutes of play you learn how to keep track of your limbs. Strategic thinking quickly emerges: how to swing around to attack the head of an approaching enemy, how to keep your limbs between your opponents fists/feet and your vulnerable sections, which enemy positions are most vulnerable to attack, and so on.

(Ragdoll Masters Game Screenshots)

The game unfolds in open arenas of moderate size against a variety of opponents. The camera does a good job of zooming in and out as necessary to keep all combatants on screen. You start out battling a single opponent, but quickly move on to battling larger opponents (some 3-4x your size!), multiple opponents, and robots (stronger opponents). The advantage you have as the player is the ability to combo: success blows deal more and more damage until interrupted by an opponent successfully striking you. In larger bouts it’s practically required to reach 10+ combos in order to prevail.

Ragdoll Masters is hard. Very hard. It takes awhile to feel like your little rag-man on screen is manifesting your intentions as a player. When you finally do overcome the first few levels the game really lays it on thick. You’ll be fighting three opponents just a few levels in, and it just gets harder from there. The farthest I’ve played is level 11 of 20.

The game features arcade-style scoring: when you die the game is over. It adds to the intensity of just barely passing a new level, sure, but you also need to play the first few levels of the game over and over again. A practice mode or some other way to continue the game in order to play the higher levels more frequently would be a welcome addition to the game’s features.

Speaking of features, in addition to the single player game Ragdoll Masters also contains a 2-player versus and co-op mode. We didn’t play versus mode here for very long before launching into some delightfully entertaining co-op games. It makes the game easier–you’ll fight the same sequence of enemies with two players as you will with one–and it’s really entertaining to try to coordinate your attacks with someone else. It wasn’t long before we were frantically screaming out for help from each other. You could also try playing 2-player co-op with one person and two hands on the keyboard.

Despite its simplistic controls Ragdoll Masters does a great job of crafting an engaging entertainment experience. It’s a solid implementation of a 2D ragdoll fighting game and a definite bargain at $9.95. Give it a try!

Download the game at Rag Doll Software’s page.

(Rate this game! 122 votes, average: 3.57 out of 5)

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Japanese blogger “do_of_i” is most well known for his World of Sand digital toy, but has also created several simple physics-based games with the Java-driven Proc55ing (the same language used in this wonderful zombie simulator applet).

Cat Sledding is a simplistic physics-based alignment game. You have two keys: Z and X, which rotate left and right. You control a cat sledding down a hill in a race against other cats. Successfully landing flips elicits a meow and a boost of speed. The player skills here is the most rudimentary in physics games: predicting gravitationally-influenced movement. Do you have enough time to flip once more before the ground rushes up to meet you, or not?

That’s basically it. Despite its simplicity it manages to entertain for a few minutes. The core of the game is reminiscent of DMA Design’s Uniracers for SNES, albeit with the complexity stripped away. Uniracers is a good time, by the way–highly recommended if you didn’t have the good fortune of playing it through when it was originally released.

(Cat Sledding Game Screenshots)

Play this physics-based game online in your web browser (Java).