Physics Games and Physics-Based Game Downloads

(Rate this game! 133 votes, average: 3.22 out of 5)

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Blast Miner is the first game by Cryptic Sea, Alex Austin’s new company (Alex was a co-founder of Chronic Logic, makers of such fine physics games as Bridge Builder and Gish). Blast Miner is a physics-based drop puzzle game. You manipulate pieces that fall from the top of the screen; if the board fills, you lose. You score by blasting pieces of gold up from ground with massive, physics-riffic explosions. It sounds fun, even cathartic–but the implementation can be surprisingly frustrating, which is a shame, because I really want to like this game.

Gameplay Structure

The goal of Blast Miner is to set off explosions such that pieces of gold in the ground are thrust upwards, at which point they’re sucked into your gold-collecting machine. If too much other crap–TNT, dirt, cement–gets pulled into the machine instead, it breaks and you lose. Although this can happen prematurely if you aren’t careful, it generally occurs when the ground pushes up so far that the screen is completely filled, at which point it becomes completely inevitable.

Design Origins

Blast Miner is patterned after Triptych, a Chronic Logic game that played a bit like a physical Tetris. Alex confirms this in a Game Tunnel interview:

The original idea came from watching my friend Dave play Triptych, he got so good at the game he would throw the blocks around, not even bothering to stack them. So I thought it would be cool to have a game where smashing the blocks was the whole point.

Blast Miner has much faster pacing than Triptych, though. In fact, if you go back and play Triptych after playing a bit of Blast Miner, it feels downright sluggish. Blast Miner plays much, much faster. In fact, you almost have to play the game faster. This leads me to one of my biggest qualms.

Forced Play Style

One frustrating aspect with Blast Miner is that it’s actually quite difficult to get gold out of the ground. I suppose that’s proper, as gold is awfully precious. The most successful technique is to break open your gas cans to soak the ground underneath the gold. Then, if you detonate the soaked ground, the gold should shoot upwards–but only if there aren’t any explosions above the gold, which push it back down.

One way to play the game is to carefully manage the placement of all of your pieces. You can deliberately set up circumstances that will net you gold if you’re careful. The game doesn’t really support this style of play, though. The ground rises too quickly, and before long you’re swamped. The end result is a score that pales in comparison to Alex’s and Edmund’s scores on the high score list.

Thankfully, you can view the replays of any game on the online scoreboard. Watch the top players and you’ll quickly see how you should be playing. They spam pieces as quickly as possible, only occasionally slowing to take advantage of an opportune situation. There is some craft and some skill to this technique, sure, but it’s really the only valid way to play Blast Miner. And that’s a shame, because the hallmark of a great physics game is one that supports multiple play styles, without allowing any particular style to completely dominate another. Blast Miner fails this test.

(Blast Miner Game Screenshots)

Blast Away, Brave Miner

Blast Miner delivers solid physics, Edmund’s signature art style, and some variety in game modes (“super” mode with acid and time bombs and a 2-player versus mode). The game does feel a little rough around the edges, particularly with the pacing. The rewards are spaced too far apart to really get into a nice positive feedback rhythm.

Of course, it’s very easy to armchair game design. The reality is the implementation of an idea and the practical realities of development present a very complex challenge to a developer. Still, I feel like all that Blast Miner needs to shine is some iteration. If it were my game, I’d sit off-the-street players down on tape, silently observe them play the game for the first time, and then analyze the results. Rinse, repeat, and work towards something that encompasses a wider range of styles.

If your own personal play style coincides with the fast-as-possible mentality needed to succeed in Blast Miner, you should really enjoy the title. The rest of us may not be so lucky, but all physics game lovers should definitely check it out nonetheless.

Download Blast Miner Demo (10 MB)

The full version of the game is $19.95 and available from the official Blaster Miner webpage.

Someone took Line Rider to bold new levels of insanity:

P.S. New reviews this weekend! (Just about finished with a contract job that’s been eating time)

I’ve had a lot of emails asking for clarification on which games have MacOS versions available. When I get a free moment I’ll update the list of physics games with OS icons, so it’s easier to see at a glance. In the meantime, though, of the games I’ve reviewed so far these have MacOS builds:

1. Cat Sledding (Java)
2. Line Rider (Flash)
3. Lugaru
4. Pogo Sticker
5. Ragdoll Masters
6. Rocky the Monkey
7. Stair Dismount
8. TubeTwist
9. Truck Dismount
10. Toribash
11. TG Motorcross 2 (Flash)
12. Super Stealball

That’s just off the top of my head, so I may have missed a few. I’ll do a news post when I update the list with better OS identification. Keep in mind that the download links to any files actually hosted here are Windows (look for the link to the official game page at the end of the review).

Of course, there are piles and piles of physics-based Flash games out there too. I haven’t decided how to review those yet; I’ll probably do roundups with multiple games in a review, rather than do the whole video/etc treatment for each individual game.