Phun is without question the greatest computer toy in the history of the universe, if this had been around when I was a kid I would be a frickin genius by now. You don't need things any more.
Emil Ernerfeldt, a graduate student at Umeå University in Sweden, has developed a 2D physics engine, Phun, for his master's thesis project. Phun is part toy, part educational medium. He describes it thusly:
"Phun is an educational, entertaining and somewhat addictive piece of software for designing and exploring 2D multi-physics simulations in a cartoony fashion. It is part of our long term mission to bring visual physics based simulation to the masses. The application is developed for Umevatoriet, Umeås new science center, where it will run on a large interactive display, but you can also download it and run it on your own pc."
Which you can do by clicking the link below.
Improve the graphics, add some coop editing, and some jumping guys... and what is this?
Holy crap that's great. All I had when I was growing up was Kid Pix. You had to draw the physics in yourself...
Edit: For some reason the article doesn't mention you can get it on its website here: http://www.acc.umu.se/~emil...
Go Sweden! :)
and now we have LittleBigPlanet
... but it was slow as hell on my pc, which is weird, cause my PC is pretty new, so I think it's either a software-bug or something else.