E-Motion (MS-DOS)

E-Motion was developed by the British studio The Assembly Line in 1990; in North America Accolade published it under the title The Game of Harmony. European boxes carried a caricature of Albert Einstein, and the pun was intentional — the E in the name stands for him, and the game itself is Newtonian physics dressed up in day-glo colours.

You steer a little craft with full Asteroids-style inertia: rotate, thrust, and drift, because nothing ever stops on the spot. The playfield has no walls — fly off one edge and you reappear on the opposite side — and it is littered with coloured spheres. Nudge two of the same colour together and they vanish. Nudge two different colours together and they spit out tiny pods which, left alone, grow into brand new spheres. Every mistake literally breeds more work, which is one of the most elegant punishment systems of its era.

Later levels tie the spheres together with elastic strands, so a push on one end twitches through the whole web. A level ends only when the screen is clean, the clock is always short, and a second player can join in, roughly doubling the chaos.

Honestly, the controls fight you at first. Inertia plus a timer is a recipe for frustration, and anyone expecting a calm logic game will be startled: this is physics as an action sport, thinking with your hands. Stick with it, though, and you find a genuinely original design with no close relatives among its contemporaries. Its real weakness is monotony — the core idea never changes across the dozens of levels, it just keeps getting denser.

The DOS version runs on oldgame.cz straight in your browser, nothing to install.