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Comment by brundolf | Hacker News Reader

It's incredibly hard to design a game around an emergent physical system where that system not only allows the gameplay to remain fun, but actually contributes to the fun in a meaningful way. The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild did an astoundingly good job of this, but it's one of the only examples I can think of where it really worked at all. Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts is the other, though most people probably haven't heard of that one.

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Nuts and Bolts is a tragically underrated game.

The physics simulation is on just the right side of fun/realism, insane contraptions work but the system is flexible enough that players jury rigged turrets.

Lots of games in a similar vein have followed, but I haven't found any to be as easy to play and as fun.

It still blows my mind the kinds of things I was able to make, and the kind of ingenuity that was sometimes (successfully!) required of me to solve the problems presented.

My favorite creation was the "wall-driving car". You could just make a car, and put a propeller on top pointed upward, and it would press you against whatever surface you were on so you could drive on walls or even the ceiling. That worked. And I'm almost certain the devs never imagined it.

I also made a working pod-racer by putting tiny propellers underneath a pair of jet engines (and under the seat), and connecting them to the seat using those flexible coupling-beams. And it drove like a pod-racer. It looked exactly like something out of the film, the way it moved. It was amazing.

Maybe I need to boot that game back up :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brabham_BT46#Brabham_BT46B_%...

the 2J did it first...

I'm really hopping that I get to play this game one day, but it's a shame it was on the X-Box :( it's probably the only exclusive that was attractive on this platform.

Xbox 360 actually

I still remember when Red Faction: Guerilla was hyped up as an amazing feat because it had destructible environment and they promised you could use physics and destruction to pass missions in unusual ways. Sadly, it turned out to be, as it usually is, severely limited by the technical side of things.

> It's incredibly hard to design a game around an emergent physical system where that system not only allows the gameplay to remain fun, but but actually contributes to the fun in a meaningful way

Starsiege: Tribes

This comment probably is referring to Tribes’ hill skiing “feature” that became a core gameplay mechanic in Tribe’s 2 - though I guess it’s fair to say this wasn’t originally by design, but a nice accident.

You mean like some kind of emergent physical system? ;)

For context: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zIAWzG-wOKY&t=4m11s (~1999, probably)

That one mechanic emerged and became popular is not the same as a game whose core conceit depends on emergence occurring within each game.

I would argue they're extremely similar across successful emergent games.

The core feature of a playable, entertaining emergent game is a set of flexible gameplay rules, able to bend and tolerate the unexpected without breaking.

In the case of Tribes, there weren't any gameplay rules predicated on movement speed or height. Consequently, skiing only enriched gameplay. I would argue that EVE Online features the same style of emergent-tolerant rules.

In contrast would be something like Braid, where the available actions and rules, while seeming free, are in fact extremely rigid and intolerant of the unexpected.

Failed emergent games typically fail by innovating in their gameplay, but attempting to apply inflexible or overly-specific rules on top of that.

Yep. I’m in your side. My comment was mostly to add context because it looked like folks were downvoting you because googling makes people mad.

Or because the comment was low effort.

I make low effort comments all the time (and I’m trying to improve). We need to work together. Ultimately I think we are all on the same side. An encouraging comment can help a low efforter see the light.

Pedantic nitpicking is a greater threat to HN than low effort comments.

Talking at, and not with each other is worse than both :)

My experience has been there's a small Venn sliver of people who are both diligent enough to continue an extended thread and sociopathic(?) enough to completely ignore what the other person is saying.

That said, HN probably beats the average on finding those folks too. ;)

Tbh, I expect most of the downvotes are from people who weren't gaming in the late 90s.

I think a huge element of it is that comment boards like this are hugely impersonal compared to forums back in the day. There's very little room for socialization, so we don't socialize on these platforms, we proselytize, and sometimes it looks like socializing :)

I would count Worms in that category. Endless fun in the 90's destroying the level and the other guys!

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