Palfrey's life

I've just been playing a lovely little game called BreakQuest. At one level, it's a bat-and-balls, Arkanoid-style game that we've all seen a million of. Except, it's not. The first bright idea was to embed a decent physics model into the game, and then they started playing around with weird blocks - not just the "sit there, die when hit" ones, but odd shaped ones and ones that bounce around. And then there's more coolness - ever had the situation where you've been playing one of those games and the ball bounces into the top section of some blocks only to fly out the other side with practically zero damage? Well, in BreakQuest, there's the "gravitor" - press the right mouse button, and the ball is temporarily under the effect of gravity i.e. you can shape which way it goes in flight :-) The game is quite thoroughly psychotic, and utterly fun.

Now, this is a damn good game. So good, having played through the demo levels, I frantically paid up for the full version (~£12 - I *like* indie games). Why is it damn good? The physics engine, and what it lets the game designers do with an old genre. This got me thinking: two other games I've really liked in recent times are Gish (crazy platformer) and Half-life 2. Both have a full physics engine, and both use it to make the game more fun (HL2 less so). Can a physics engine be applied to other genres in interesting ways to create new genres? Maybe. I'm currently envisioning a Pac-man like game, except with the player in a spaceship under the effect of gravity (with trivial landing, not the damn hard landing of most thrust-style games, and probably bouncing off of walls). The "ghosts" become wall-crawling aliens who will eat your spaceship if you fly in the same corridor as them.

That's probably not the best example, but I'm betting some of you lot can come up with better ideas....