I haven’t bough Braid yet, although I’ve heard it is pretty awesome. I’m going to try and get my hands on some MS points to get this and hopefully Castle Crashers. And there’s also the hannabi festival on the Wii where I can get Super Mario RPG! Wow, I sorely need money.

Speaking of games that are artistically heavy on the visual side, anyone bought Braid on Xbox Live? Absolutely amazing.

I think people need to make a distinction between ‘detailed’ physics and ‘realistic’ physics.

Lets put it this way: You cite Boom Boxx (amazing game, btw) as a game with realistic physics. True, when all the blox… er, blocks – are falling down, they all behave in a way which doesn’t suspend the belief that your mind has in this make-believe world. Looking closer at the actual physics, there’s not really any friction, unless something’s being pushed down on, and gravity is super slow. The physics are detailed enough that every block can influence another in a way that your brain can follow, yet they do so in a way that is good for gameplay, or because of the limits of the system and the math.

Or, I slice my opponent upwards in Soul Calibur, the action feels meaty, there’s weight there, resistance, the move has a lot of power behind it, and because of that, my opponent reacts by being flung into the air. Realistic? Not at all. Conveying the appropriate data to the player? Absolutely.

The physics in FPA aren’t realistic in the slightest, they’re just detailed. Most actions get reactions, yet everything is timed according to gameplay, not according to ‘realism.’

Developers today confuse a world with realistic reactions with a world with detailed reactions. In Metal Gear Solid, a soldier saw a footprint and followed it, that was an awesome detail. Was the reaction realistic? Nope.

The Force Unleashed plops the player into a world with attempted realism replacing detail. I can grab a storm trooper, and their middle ware tells him to grab onto a crate and stay there, because they consider that realistic. Is holding a baddie clinging onto a create not able to fling him around anymore while getting shoot by all the other baddies fun? Not at all.

Shooting something and watching it fly into the air, or bounce around crazily, or even just make a stupid sound effect and dance around is usually more fun than shooting something and seeing it fall away ‘realistically.’

Luckily, until now, the limitations of console processing power forced developers to use detailed physics, instead of ‘realistic’ physics. I’m very, very scared that ‘realism’ will be the industry’s next bullet point/bragging right/sales pitch (‘open world’ being the last, terrible terrible terrible idea that ruined many games, SSX: On Tour being one that I grieved for much) that developers will throw in to make their games more marketable and less unique or fun.

I do think it’s funny that on IGN’s latest podcast, Mark Bozon said that he preferred the Wii version of Unleashed because it had less clutter and was basically more playable, ‘had a better flow to it’, I think he said.

Also, Half Life 2 has realistic physics to an extent, but they’re all tweaked in a manner that lends themselves to gameplay. Being able to jump on creates floating on water, or getting saw blades stuck in wood, or the exaggerated way corpses react when you chuck stuff at them. I would be inclined to call those more detailed than realistic. Yeah, yeah, I know, Havoc, blah blah blah. Well, Smash Bros. Brawl uses Havoc physics too

However, if you ever have some sort of mechanism in mind that wouldn’t work in something you had planned let me know, eh? Perhaps even an collaboration of sorts.