#Zen bound ios full#
#Zen bound ios series#

In a sense, they were kind of interactive toys showing off the future of games. They didnвЂ™t demand much twitch skill from the player, or advanced knowledge of the rules. Like many of the online games popular in the early 2000s, Stair DismountВ and Truck DismountВ also benefitted from their simplicity. You wanted to see how far you could push the simulation, what might happen if you just changed your angle a little or used a bit more force. The concept of characters in a game reacting semi-realistically to your actions, rather than with canned animations, itself gave the DismountВ games a ton of replayability. Today, real-time physics are a staple of video games, but back then, we hadnвЂ™t really seen anything like them before. What was so compelling about the DismountВ games? For one thing, they were a novelty at the time.

#Zen bound ios series#

Apparently, they went on to make other DismountВ games and ported some of them to mobile devices, but I lost track of the series after Truck Dismount. tAAt followed up Stair DismountВ with a sequel, Truck Dismount, in which the unlucky protagonist is caught between a wall and a moving vehicle. After all, it made it all the way to a Canadian high school, so it definitely had some reach. ItвЂ™s barely a game at all, more of a physics experiment, but it was the first thing I ever played where physics were so integral to the experience.Д¬alled PorrasturvatВ in its original Finnish (which allegedly means вЂњFalling-on-your-face-on-some-stairsвЂќ and which Google Translate renders as вЂњstair safetyвЂќ), Stair DismountВ was created for a game dev contest called Assembly and brought its creators wide acclaim outside of the demoscene. YouвЂ™re shown a three-dimensional stick figure at the top of some stairs, given a few points on his body to select from, and then nudge him into a deadly tumble, with points calculated for damage done to his poor twisted frame. What is Stair Dismount, you might ask if you werenвЂ™t an easily-entertained high school student in the early 2000s? Well, itвЂ™s a game where you push a guy down some stairs.

#Zen bound ios full#

The correct answer is Stair Dismount, a game released by Finnish demoscene group tAAT in 2002, a full two years before Gordon FreemanвЂ™s adventure with the gravity gun. If I asked you to tell me what the most important physics-based video game of the last 20 years was, you might say Half-Life 2.