Saturday, February 27, 2010

5 Great Falling Sand Games





THE FALLING SAND GAME is by far one of the most enjoyable games to play: it's addictive, creative, original and replayable. this game is so good it has many online variations online, and a couple of downloadable versions with probably hundreds of MODS. here's a list of my personal favorites


1. Dan Ball's Powder Game
Dan ball's powder game has got to be the most complete falling sand game engine out there. Despite the game's tiny dimensions (obviously to enhance performance) Dan Ball's powder game has great features that other FSG don't, such like the ability of loading and saving, the copy paste feature and my favorite: the ability to control a stickman figure and interact with your creation (everyone ends up killing them haha)

The game's instructions are abit criptyc as Dan Ball is Japanese, but the game is pretty much self-explainable. Like all the FSG you got a bunch of elements and these interact with each other..better played than explained.

tip: sometimes you work very hard and make a cool creation but you may not understand how the save / load mechanism works. well first off, there are actually two load-save modes..the first one is inside the game, at the left side of the control bar. pressing "save" will kind of make a screenshot of your creation and "load" will load it..however next time you visit the game, this data will be erased (I'm not sure what the "upload" button makes here, it never worked for me) what you wanna do to save your game is to go to to the top of the page where it says "save game" followed by a blank space. press "get" and a code will appear in the blank space. you can copy (ctrl-c) this code paste it on notepad and save it; then you can copy the code from your notepad file, paste it on the same blank space and press "set". voila, your creation has been saved.
Play it here: http://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/

2. Falling Sand Game
this is the standard FSG. you got 4 elements falling from the sky and a bunch of elements to interact with. also you got this weird shape (called "slug" in japanese) that grows with water and or destroys elements, it's pretty straight forward but what I like about this version is that it's almost fullscreen and has a nice speed, also you want to play this one to get the gist of it, think of it as an intro to the FSG.

Play it here: http://www.fallingsandgame.com/sand/

3. Pyro Sand 2
Pyro sand -as it's name suggests it- is focused on fire. flammable elements are added to the usual ( sand, oil, salt ,etc.) plus a lot of other neat stuff like fuses for creating bombs, methane, C-4 and more..if you find yourself burning everything up in FSG you'll love this variation




4. WxSand
Wx Sand is a FSG developed by programmer Owen Piette. The reason I list this one here is for
two great features: first, because it's great to have a copy to play on your desktop whether the Internet is down or not, but also, because a really cool feature in the WxSand: the ability to play MODS, or modifications made by several users. In fact, what makes WxSand stand out is it's modification capabilities as it is probably the most modded FSG out there, there are dozens of mods for the Wx Sand (purple100's mods are very popular)..some really creative; from simulated wars between two elements to the ability to create / operate on your own human being, WxSand surely will keep you hooked for a good while. Also some Features I love (depending on the version) are: freezing time, Temperature manipulation, elements On Off, Save (saves in .png format, which by the way it's really cool to make a png file yourself and then opening it on WxSand) and much more.

tip: In case you missed it, Mod option is found on the File menu, it will search on the internet for online mods but you can also download mods for use in offline mode (check fsg wiki below).







5. Burning Sand

Burning Sand by German Programmer Max Nagl is an excellent FSG adaptation. The first main difference you'll note is the icon based GUI, but it is it's great features what truly makes Burning Sand worth downloading. The element editor is probably the most interesting feature of this FSG but also -at least for me- the performance is smoother and at a good resolution. The overall programming is very good and also has a modding capability, a saving mode via .png and much more, this one is definitely worth checking out.


don't miss Burning Sand 2!!





Don't forget to visit the falling sand game wiki for more online and offline versions, Mods info and everything you can think of realted to the FSG
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1 comment:

  1. DavidJanuary 24, 2013 at 1:41 AM

    Thanks for the post. I love playing game and will definately try this one for sure.

    Sand Art Game

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