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Teardown Zero Punctuation review Yahtzee Croshaw Tuxedo Labs environmental destruction heists

Teardown – Zero Punctuation

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This week in Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Teardown.

For more major games Yahtz has reviewed lately, check out 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, Weird West, Tunic, Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, and Elden Ring.

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Transcript

The introduction of the physics engine to video games was right up there with the introduction of the potato to the Irish, or depending on your perspective the introduction of the smallpox blanket to the native Americans. What a sea change it was when loose objects weren’t just falling straight down onto the floor but also bouncing a little bit once they got there. Fucking hell, that was well worth enslaving all those Asian children to build video cards. But game technology is still yet to realise the full potential of real world physics. There’s no game yet where, say, the water level in the ocean is affected by the gravitational pull of a large orbiting satellite. Boy, I bet something like that would finally be the thing to fill the ever-sucking void. That’d definitely be the technical milestone that actually would compensate for a lack of actual gameplay or narrative innovation. But the question that has long sat awkwardly alongside the physics engine like an excruciatingly poorly matched blind date is this: could we one day construct an entire game world from physics objects, so the player can break everything apart to their heart’s content, from the buildings to the bidets?


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Author
Image of Yahtzee Croshaw
Yahtzee Croshaw
Yahtzee is the Escapist’s longest standing talent, having been writing and producing its award winning flagship series, Zero Punctuation, since 2007. Before that he had a smattering of writing credits on various sites and print magazines, and has almost two decades of experience in game journalism as well as a lifelong interest in video games as an artistic medium, especially narrative-focused. He also has a foot in solo game development - he was a big figure in the indie adventure game scene in the early 2000s - and writes novels. He has six novels published at time of writing with a seventh on the way, all in the genres of comedic sci-fi and urban fantasy. He was born in the UK, emigrated to Australia in 2003, and emigrated again to California in 2016, where he lives with his wife and daughters. His hobbies include walking the dog and emigrating to places.