Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Geek toy!
Major coolness for engineering geeks. Check out Armadillo Run, a virtual erector set with realistic physics. Jake ripped through the free demo in about two hours, leaving his World of Warcraft adventuring behind.
Here’s the blurb from the website:
Armadillo Run is a physics-based puzzle game. You have to build structures with the purpose of getting an armadillo to a certain point in space. There is a selection of building materials, each with different properties, which can be combined to form almost anything. The realistic physics simulation gives you the freedom to solve each level in many different ways.
Why didn’t they have stuff like this when I was a kid?
Because computers were the size of Walmarts back then, and all they could do was add, subtract, multiply, and divide — that’s why! You old fart, you.
D.
They didn’t have armadillos when you were a kid? Man, you must be old!
Oh, BE that way.
🙂
I try, Doug, I try. It’s all part of my overwhelming charm.
For the record, I have in fact seen a computer the size of a Wal-Mart. Back in the day, my dad was a systems analyst for Bank of Montreal, then the largest Canadian bank. He used to take me down to the data centre on weekends. The computer banks filled an entire floor in a large office tower. And that was just the regional processing centre.
Well, we gave it a try, but the shorter of us seems to prefer running poor armadillo off the ends of the ramps, or building things that implode, rather than helping him on his quest.
Much hilarity was had, but we didn’t make it through many levels.