Pastor DisasterJourneyman
Posts : 1056
Joined: 14 DEC 2004
Status : Online | Before I begin, I feel it is only fair to warn you that I have a bachelor's degree in physics, and have always been a bit of a science geek. So that may bias my analysis of this game.
Emotional Experience
My emotional experience with Physicus is best described as a "riches-to-rags-to-riches" story. When I first heard about it, my initial response was, "That is thoroughly ingenious! An adventure game which uses and teaches physics! Why didn't anyone think of that before? This is a totally new concept!" So perhaps it is my fault that the game did not live up to my inflated expectations.
About halfway through the game, I got discouraged in that the physics needed was either reasonably easy to guess at (trial and error) or was used in a way unrelated to itself (e.g., using the numerical density of something to as the combination to open a lock). So I put the game away for a while, and even went so far as to grouse on the JA+ forum about this.
Having vented my (admittedly petty) frustration on the forums, I decided to resume the game. Perhaps I had matured in the interim, or perhaps I had just forgotten how much fun adventure games could be. But the game suddenly became fun! It became one of they most enjoyable games I've ever played!
Go figure.
Now, I neglected to read the "official" review of this game before typing this little post, so I probably will cover a lot of the same ground. Oh well, if you're bored enough to read a physics major's take on Physicus, pretty much anything I say will be entertaining.
Overview of the Game
In this game, you are an interplanetary traveler who has landed on a plant which has stopped rotating (due to the impact of an asteroid). Okay, you'll have to take that with a grain of salt--the "sun side" has not burned to a crisp and the "night side" has not frozen over. Really, the only net result of this is that all of the people have vacated the planet. Your job is to fire up a machine that one of their scientists built (but never got a chance to activate), which will catapult a huge rock into space, thus kick-starting the planet again (Another grain of salt time).
Okay, the setup kinda sucks. But it does get better.
In order to activate this machine, you need to engage three generators and set them to specific electrical outputs. In order to engage the generators, you need to go through the standard series of inventory-gathering, puzzle-solving, and pixel-hunting. The unique catch is, most of the time the problems are solved using physics at various levels of difficulty.
For those of you scared of this, rest assured you are given a "laptop" early on with way more information than you need, explaining everything from optics to heat to simple machines. You might think this is really boring, but actually it was about the best series of lectures (and plenty of visual demonstrations) on physics I'd ever seen. Don't worry, there is no quantum mechanics or general relativity involved! This is straight Newtonian physics (levers, lenses, soundwaves, etc.).
Given that background, let me tell you my opinions...
Dyslexics wonder why there isn't a word that means the same thing as "cinnamon."
|
