Never a pulley was so useful

I am not a good computer game player. I am rather the kind of person that gets stuck in each level for years and never finds the appropriate key on time to avoid the enemy bullets. I plead guilty to the following charges:

• Run directly towards (and through) carnivorous plants and turtles in Super Mario Bros.

• Get completely lost and shot my own team members without even noticing it in Counter-Strike.

• Make car spins until death while driving along a straight road during the tutorial in The Godfather.

• Send a villager through the forest and let the wolves bit her in The Age of Empires. Manage to rescue her on time and then, send her alone to the enemy village to build a granary where thirty soldiers shot her with arrows. Poor woman! She was a martyr!

• Knock down people supporting me during a rally race while driving in the opposite direction in Death Rally. Put the car into reverse and run over their corpses.

But it doesn’t matter how many disasters I cause due to my confusion with the controls, how many times I send my game character to a certain death or how fast I get the game over display. I keep on playing new games from time to time.

Today I would like to recommend you one of my favorite games: Magic Pen, a very simple game with infinite possibilities. The goal of the game is to reach the red flags with a red ball (sometimes a square). To achieve it you can draw objects with your mouse that interacts with your red ball according to the basic physics laws: inertia, gravity, friction, etc. And apart from drawing you can also erase and use pins and hinges(a pin fixes two objects and a hinge allows rotation!). The only thing you should be aware of is that the ball can’t go beyond the limits of the screen!

What makes this game so funny is its flexibility and its sense of ‘no-rules’, which gives you almost completely liberty to use your imagination as far as you want. It doesn’t matter if you play the same level twenty times. If you use different approaches each time, it will appear as a completely new level to you. These are some possibilities:

The straightforward approach

The sophisticated approach

The baroque "I am losing my mind" approach

For those who are willing to create impossible machines, cranes, chains or even cars just to move an imaginary ball from one side of the computer screen to the other one… this is your game!