Asteroids
Such a wonderful game concept, I’m upset I didn’t think of it myself: Reference Games‘ Relativistic Asteroids!
Like classic Asteroids, the player controls a spaceship in a deadly asteroid field. The player has to destroy all of the asteroids by breaking them into smaller pieces; when the pieces are small enough, the asteroids disappear. Just for fun, add in the occasional passing alien spaceship for a real challenge. The alien ships shoot back, so the player is forced to dodge their shots.
Asteroids is one of those games that should seem really easy, but takes a while to master. The difficulty isn’t obvious at first. The asteroids move slowly and the player can stand in place while taking them out.
The difficulty comes at the first close call. The novice player panics and causes the ship to accelerate away from the inbound asteroid. The game’s physics is purely Newtonian, and the player’s ship continues along a straight line in accordance with Newton’s first law. The only way to slow the ship is to fire the engine in the opposite direction of the ship’s travel — and that’s easier said than done when dodging giant space-rocks. This is the point in the game when my ship usually turns into a pile of two-dimensional vector-drawn space-rubble.
In Relativistic Asteroids, the player experiences the game as if they were able to accelerate from rest to a large fraction of the speed of light.
The default reference frame is that of an arbitrary outside observer. But in game, be sure to try the other available reference frame by pressing the ‘F’ key. The view will center on the player’s ship. Accelerating the player’s ship causes the asteroids to appear to change velocity, since the view on the screen is following the ship. Flip back and forth a few times and you’ll understand how there really is no preferred frame of reference — all that matters is the relative velocities between the objects.
When the ship starts to move too fast, the player will notice relativistic length contraction: the ship (or asteroids, depending on reference frame) will diminish in length!
More on special relativity in a future post. For now, I need to go work on getting a high score.
(Thanks to Uncertain Principles.)
Tags: asteroids, fun, game, physics, Random, relativity, space
Physics Is Phun, Random | Jim | 
March 12, 2008 9:04 pm
4 Comments
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By Bill Ruhsam, March 13, 2008 @ 9:27 am
Sweet. I’m there as soon as I get home tonight!
By smm, March 13, 2008 @ 3:04 pm
Thanks for the nice review of the game. Glad you liked it!
By Bill Ruhsam, March 15, 2008 @ 10:45 am
Having been an asteroids addict, I must comment that this game is easier than the original on the atari. The thruster is much more powerful (which was a signficant handicap on Atari) and your shots are unlimited! Not that I wouldn’t expect spaced-asteroid-destroying technology to improve in the 25 years since I sat on my living room floor rolling the Asteroids scoreboard over and over.
By his, March 18, 2008 @ 8:02 am
Bill,
Try our new Sandbox version… we added the ability of controlling the thrust of the ship using the ‘t’ and ‘g’ keys.
It also seems to affect the relativistic nature of the game (seen in both length contraction and time dilation).
Thanks for the suggestion.
Oh and you have to restart you browser to refresh the game version.