Dynamic Systems is a physics-based puzzle game. As is common for this type of game, your goal is to get the ball into the goal. In this case the ball is metal, and the goal is a cup. You move certain objects into place and rotate them into the correct orientation to allow the ball to roll, bounce, or otherwise be moved into the cup. Thankfully, unlike most puzzle games, Dynamic Systems offers solutions to each level's puzzle right in the game.

The feel of the game is somewhat like Collider, with floating metal bars and dirty industrial graphics everywhere. The background music in Dynamic Systems is relatively soothing, but as the game gets more challenging, the repetitive nature of the music becomes pretty frustrating. Thankfully, you can turn it off.

The difficulty in Dynamic Systems grows slowly but steadily, making it a fun game to come back to.

While pretty graphics are nice, my favorite time wasters are those that have a great concept, and I'm particularly partial to physics games. Color Infection is definitely one of my favorites.

I was therefore very happy to discover that there is now a sequel, Color Infection 2. The concept and game-play is all the same, but this iteration is a little more challenging. In particular, the later levels start using multiple weighted platforms that have you counting on your fingers and backwards trying to make sense of it all.

If that sort of thing is your bag, you're going to like Color Infection 2. If not, I find I keep coming back to Learn to Fly; maybe that would be a good alternative.

I have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

We've seen plenty of physics games before in our Time Wasters, but Bipole adds another little twist to the usual gravity-and-motion challenge: polarity.

The goal in Bipole is to cause two oppositely-charged orbs to collide and destroy each other. Your only controls are the left and right arrow keys which rotate the play area causing the particles to roll, fall, and bounce.

As with real magnets, opposites attract and likes repel. Some levels (like the on pictured) contain polarity-altering devices. Hit them at the wrong time, and your particles will thwart your attempts at collision and shoot away from each other.

I hope level 7 gives you as much grief as it did me. It didn't take a long time for me to beat, but those annoying little skulls made me retry about a dozen times before I finally managed to drift down to the goal.

It's worth knowing that Bipole lets you violate the laws of physics by pausing with the space bar. When you do that, your particles come to rest and lose all momentum. Other objects in the game, however, keep right on moving. Say, that might come in handy somewhere...

[via JayIsGames]

I hope the genre of physics-based games on the web never dies, because they're just too damn fun. Color Infection is just such a game, where the object is to "infect" all of the yellow balls by turning them brown. Yellow balls are turned brown when they come in contact with brown balls, so the object of the game is to release the balls in such an order that every yellow ball is at some point touched by a brown ball.

Because much of the game relies on balls slowly rolling down slightly inclined planes, the game can become very slow. Luckily, the game designer anticipated that problem, and if you tap one of the number keys on your keyboard while you are playing, the game speed will multiply by the number you pressed. I found the game to be mostly playable at 5x regular speed, but there are moments requiring very careful timing where I had to slow it down to 2x or even 1x.

Jelly Towers is a physics-based flash game in which the goal is to feed jelly blocks to monsters called Jydras. Too successfully complete a level, you must stack up the jelly blocks to get them to the point where one is near or covering the mouth of the Jydra.

You get variously colored and shaped blocks to deal with, and manipulating them can be challenging since you grab with your mouse pointer, and they can rotate around the axis of the point at which you grabbed them. Further, the tether that you have to grab with is elastic, so the jelly blocks tend to move around more than you might like.

I'm not sure what it is about this game that keeps me engaged; I find it frustrating at times, and the Jydra component is not very compelling, at least from my perspective. But it's a new and different physics-based game, and I can't seem to get enough of them.