Daily News Courier

Real Boxing on Project Shield looks like a knock-out

NVIDIA has posted another Project Shield teaser, this time showing off the controls of the clamshell playing Real Boxing — an unreleased title for the Tegra platform. 

Real Boxing looks like a smash hit in the making. A full career mode, mini-games to build your character, and action inside the ring filled with blood are the keys to a great boxing game, and Real Boxing has all this and more. Since it' designed for the Tegra 4, you'll have extra texture packs, better physics, more polygons, and everything else that comes along with NVIDIA sponsored games. I'm a sucker for boxing titles, and I cant wait for this one. 

Having a built-in controller for games like Real Boxing should really take things to the next level of fun. Android, and quite a few games support external controllers, but I've found this can often be a bit janky and require a lot of setup to get things working. Having the controller as part of the device, and titles made especially for use with it, should allow us to throw all the left hooks and upper cuts we can handle. 

There's a video after the break, be sure to have a look — especially if you're a fan of boxing games like I am.

Source: NVIDIA

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How Particle Physics Is Improving Recommendation Engines

The same physics that governs the behaviour of photons and electrons may also improve online shopping recommendations, say researchers

Geoengineering Could Be Essential to Reducing the Risk of Climate Change

Using technology to cool the planet may be the only way to deal with the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere, argues scientist David Keith.

Geoengineering

Bad Piggies review

Bad Piggies launched on Android and iOS today, mashing together the physics-based, build-it-yourself gameplay of Amazing Alex with the highly recognizable green pigs from Rovio’s first smash hit, Angry Birds. Angry Birds is a hard act to follow even by its own creator. Can this pig fly and do Rovio’s heritage justice, or are we just seeing a lot of lipstick?

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Rovio Confirms Bad Piggies Launch Date of September 12

The Counterintuitive Physics of Tarzan Swings

When Tarzan leaps from a swinging rope, when should he let go to jump furthest? The answer isn’t as simple as you might think

Let’s ignore air resistance for a second. If you point a cannon, aim an arrow or throw a basketball, the trajectory that gets you furthest will be at 45 degrees to the vertical. So the same must be true for Tarzan on a rope swing. He ought to let go when the rope is at 45 degrees to the vertical, right?

Special Relativity And The Curious Physics of Chronology

Einstein showed that two unrelated events can appear in any order depending on your point of view. Now physicists have discovered the chronologies of three events, and more

Special relativity has changed the way we think about time and the order of events. Einstein famously showed that two events can look simultaneous to one observer but not to another. In fact, it’s possible to make two spatially separated events appear in any order by choosing to view them from different frames of reference . 

Amazing Alex review – fun, but far from new

Rovio broke out of their Angry Birds shell today with a game called Amazing Alex. Once upon a time it was known as Casey's Contraptions, until Rovio gobbled up the developer, chewed on it for a few months, and spat out this physics title for Android and iOS. 

Anyone that had played The Incredible Machine back in the day will know the drill. Every level, players are given a simple objective, like knocking over a pile of books, or getting a bowling ball into a basket. Various obstacles are already in place, and players are provided with a limited toolbox of extras to build a Rube Goldberg-style machine and achieve the objective. The main appeal is that all of those objects act as you would expect – scissors close when touched, billiard balls bounce less than tennis balls, balloons float, and so on. The three stars in every level act as secondary objectives, which players can earn by knocking objects into them. 

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Amazing Alex is another fun physics game from the makers of Angry Birds

I didn’t “get” Angry Birds when it debuted on Android. How anyone could have fun in a game in which players fling birds at a bunch of pigs was beyond me. But as I moved beyond the easy stages and started getting more challenging levels, I realized how much fun it could be to think about the right amount of force at the right angle could knock something over. Amazing Alex, the latest game from the game studio that created Angry Birds, gives me that same feeling.

Amazing Alex starts out ridiculously easy and guides the player through the first few levels to explain how to use certain game elements. A combination of balloons, book shelves, boxes, gadgets, tubes, and more are used to do things like get a ball in a basket or pop a balloon. Items are stationed and positioned in specific ways to ensure that the target is reached, and in a domino effect set-up, one element can be positioned to trigger another.

Stars are positioned throughout each level, so players earn points for having items travel over them. The goal on each level is to touch all the stars and complete the stated mission. So if the goal is to get two tennis balls off a bookshelf and into a basket, players have to take a given set of items and figure out how to do that and get as many stars as possible. That means they’ll position a bookshelf on each side, rotate them at a 45 degree angle, and then put a ballon to rise up to another bookshelf and hit a soccer ball that will push the tennis balls over the edge. Then it’s just a matter of letting the laws of physics play out and hit the stars for full points.

Amazing Alex is not a groundbreaking, Earth shattering game, but it provides the same style of gradual complexity that made Angry Birds so enjoyable. I doubt it will have as much commercial success, and I think Cut The Rope is more fun, but Amazing Alex is an enjoyable take on a familiar genre. The game has more than 100 levels to keep you busy, so try out the free version (16 levels) and upgrade to the $0.99 paid app to get the complete experience. There’s also a $2.99 HD version to play with higher quality graphics.

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Rovio Reveals Amazing Alex Release Date and Teaser Trailer