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Different things, Tips. Mario and Sonic games don't have physics engines. There's a very basic set of predefined responses to certain situations in them, mainly based, as I understand it, on the animation routines. That's how they handle things like slippy surfaces - stop moving on *this* surface and one animation routine kicks in, stop on *that* one and another takes its place. Animation routine 1 stops you dead, #2 produces a 'skid', which is just a pre-animated movement routine that carries the sprite forwards by a set number of pixels after the player's taken hir thumb off the d-pad.
In contrast, this has a full-on physics engine behind it, which gives items within the world mass, weight and friction. The animation on the player characters is probably still all pre-defined, but the movement of the items they're interacting with isn't - those things (the rock, the football, the ropes) are moving according to their 'physical' properties. It means you're unlikely to get the exact same response in repeated games, but you can make a fairly accurate prediction as to the kind of response you'll get on a first glance, based on how items of those sorts would interact with each other in the real world.
Which might be why Elijah describes it as 'iffy', I suppose. A better description would be 'natural', but if you're use to the very unnatural responses in most other 2D platformers up until this point in time, this is going to look a bit odd. It's not precise, not mathematical.
What it is, is about play and experimentation. I love the increased use of engines like Havok in newer titles, precisely for this reason. It means I'm also looking forwards to this game, although not £450's worth of looking forwards. I'd also promote caution, because it's going to take a lot of work and a lot of imagination for the designers to keep things fresh throughout an entire game - LocoRoco showed a similar kind of inventiveness and freshness during its first batch of levels, but ultimately disappointed due to having too few ideas spread too thinly. |
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