Physics Games and Physics-Based Game Downloads

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For those not familiar with the “demo scene,” there are many competitions where programmers (or programming groups) will get together and see what they can do with severe size, time, and system restraints. Sometimes they produce music, sometimes fantastic visual effects or even short CG films. In this case, developer “Hikey” has produced a ragdoll fighting game that won second place at the Breakpoint 2007 demo competition.

Simple Concept

This is a fighting game without a punch or a kick button – your persona automatically adjusts to the classic stickman pose. If a hand or a foot touches an enemy, the joint springs forward and hits the opponent.

Movement is also handled very simply; the arrow keys on the keyboard apply force to your stickman’s head. There is no restriction to jumping height (you can fly perpetually), and your momentum is only countered by the walls at the edge of the screen.

What results is surreal–your character is sailing around on the screen in what appears to be a scene only possible in The Matrix–but it’s this freedom that makes it so much more fun.

Create Your Own Moves

One of my favorite side-effects of a physics-modelled game is you don’t need to teach people how to throw a hard punch. When you only have control over the motion of your head, you’ll soon find a few different ways to get your arms and legs whipping around you to deal smashing blows to your opponents. You’ll work out neat moves you can do by springing yourself off the ground or nearby walls. The faster you are moving, the more damage you deal.

TMNP also incorporates a few seconds of slow motion every time you score a hit. Apart from looking really cool, it also gives your stickman a bit of a speed boost. If you use your slow motion time wisely by winding up for another barrage of blows, you’ll do that much more damage.

(Teenage Mutant Ninja Puppets Game Screenshots)

Mindless Fun

I found myself playing through the first few levels with relative ease, but was happy to see that the difficulty does actually ramp up quite a bit, forcing you to try out and learn new moves and tactics. And when you get stuck (did anyone defeat Mr. Ninja?), there’s a sandbox mode where you can pit yourself against 50 enemies and arm yourself with a chain or nunchucks.

Being a competition-designed 96Kb game, it didn’t exactly go through a thorough quality assurance program. Yes, it has it’s share of bugs and sure it has potential to be so much more than what it is. Despite the drawbacks, it is still worth downloading… even if it’s just to try out the bull-whip.

I do have one complaint, though–why the horrible name?

Download Teenage Mutant Ninja Puppets (68 KB)

Andy “Weasel” Moore is a programmer, technical writer, and founder of The Daily Blitz.

Toribash, the amazing physics-based fighting game, is getting a major graphics overhaul with its 3.0 release due this October. And if you haven’t played Toribash, sit down with some friends and learn the game all together. If you go online now you’ll just get your ass handed to you. There’s a very good reason that Toribash hovers near the Fun-Motion top-10 list (hint: it’s awesome).

This is all in-game:

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Garry’s Mod began as an independent mod for Half-Life 2. The mod was created by Garry Newman as a more direct way to interact and play with the physics of Half-Life 2. Since its initial release the mod has gained in popularity and moved through multiple versions until it has become what it is today: a pay-ware mod distributed through Valve’s Steam client.

Sandbox Gameplay

Garry’s Mod is a sandbox game with no goals or expectations. Players are given a huge variety of objects to spawn (ranging from coffee mugs to freight trains) as well as ragdolls and a list of various ways in which to interact with these objects. For example, ropes, pulleys, welds, and different physical properties can all be applied to objects. The game is viewed from the first-person and has both single-player and multi-player modes, each offering different experiences.

Intuitive Interaction

The primary method of interacting with objects in the game world is “the physics gun.” The physics gun, a beam weapon comparable to the proton gun from the movie Ghostbusters, is an intuitive way to interact with objects, and it allows you to move and rotate objects, as well as freeze them in place with ease. This gun behaves exactly how you want it to, and once you’ve gotten used to it, its presence will seem transparent. A second gun, “the tool gun” is used to weld objects together, attach wheels and thrusters, and generally do the majority of the building process.

Garry’s Mod has enough tools and options that there’s no conceivable limit to the things you can make. Even if you run out of things to build, or want to try something different, you can always play with ragdolls, which is inherently fun. Attach them to things, pose them, throw them off of buildings, whatever you want to do with a ragdoll.

User-made Content

It will probably be a long time before you do run out of things to keep yourself occupied, as one of Garry’s Mod’s great strengths is its user expandability. Thanks to the Source SDK, anyone can make new objects, levels, items, and game modes. Garry’s Mod also features Lua scripting, so the amount of new game modes and content is nearly limitless. There are also websites where you can download content from other players. One such website is garrysmod.org. Featuring nearly 10,000 files, it’s seemingly impossible not to find something of interest. One of my personal favorites is the PHX Premium Pack which adds a ton of new spawn items and tools to help further realize your creative visions.

Multi-player

You never know exactly what you’re going to find when you join a multi-player server. From simple building games to stat-based role-playing games to watermelon racing, the experience changes drastically in the multi-player game. It can be extremely rewarding collaborating with others to build a roller coaster, or robot, or whatever else your imaginations dream up. There are, however, downsides to multi-player. First there is no real way to save the game, as there is in single-player. That alone can be a huge problem as servers crash or people leave. More annoying still are people who intentionally crash servers by spawning large objects repeatedly or destroy others’ creations with the remover gun. Many servers have object spawn limits, or Lua scripts to prevent people from interacting with each others’ objects, but this can be detrimental to creativity, when you find yourself unable to spawn enough objects to finish a machine, or unable to work together because of inability to interface your objects with another’s.

Single-Player

While the multi-player mode is a lot of fun, single-player is ultimately where the most of my time was spent. In single-player there are no real limits to what can be done, you don’t have to worry about other people messing with your things, and you can save the game whenever you want. It’s also very rewarding to spend hours building a contraption and be able to save it so you can view it later, or show it off to your friends, or even upload it to the Internet for others to play around with. And you can spend hours and hours just playing with other peoples’ save games and enjoying their hard work. It’s this freedom of play and rewarding feeling you get when you finally finish and get to share with the world that gigantic walking robot, or battle tank, or roller coaster, or whatever you can dream up, that I believe keeps people coming back for more.

(Garry’s Mod Game Screenshots)

Overall

In short, whether you play Garry’s Mod online or offline, there is never a shortage of things to do. If you can remember spending hours building with Legos, you have some idea of the sense of accomplishment that can come from building things in Garry’s Mod. Only this time you’ll be able to experience what it feels like to crash into walls in the firetruck you’ve just spent hours building, or fly through the sky in the airplane you’ve just perfected, rather than just trying to imagine yourself as the little Lego man in the cockpit.

Official Garry’s Mod Website

Garry’s Mod costs $9.95 and is available to purchase through Steam.

Andrew Caldwell is a Journalism major at Youngstown State University.