As a former AP Physics student, I love a game with a good physics engine powering it. Seeing bullets flawlessly arc based on the amount of force put behind them and mitigated by the coefficient of air friction in front of them is always a little bit thrilling, and digital pool balls, perfectly deflected into pockets, put my soul at ease. Sure, I barely passed the course, but that was because I was too busy having a girlfriend and drawing fairies. Yes, it’s possible to do both at once. Explain THAT, physics!

Recently, the internet has given us a vast variety of simple Flash games, all of which can be quickly played in a browser window, and usually for free. Some of these games have enough graceful genius to warrant a subscription fee, and some even make the bold move onto actual gaming systems. Does ‘bored at work’ easily equate to ‘actively playing during your spare time’? Sometimes, it absolutely does.

Line Rider has been a cult-favorite website, elevated to such a status because of its simple, easily accessible execution. The premise is thus : you have two dimensions, a guy on a sled, and you draw lines that he can ride around on. Gravity and slopes in subtle variations control your rider’s path, and if he doesn’t flip over and crash out because of a funky line here or there, you gots yerself a course - the wilder the better. Especially long or interesting rides are captured and dropped into YouTube. Go on over to the site and play around!

Line Rider 2 : Unbound is a sequel of sorts to the online version of Line Rider, presented on the Nintendo DS. It’s an intuitive move - bringing a drawing game over to a system with a touch-screen and a stylus is just smart gaming. If the online version has any drawbacks, it’s that drawing with a mouse is a frustrating and clumsy experience, so ideally, the ability to actually draw your lines with a stylus would cure this.

The game has three modes : Story, Freestyle and Puzzle. Freestyle Mode most closely represents the free-for-all, make-whatever-you-want spirit of the original line rider, which really needs no additions to keep itself fresh. While the online version depends upon gravity for movement, this DS version incorporates a variety of lines that create different physical or dramatic effects for your little sled guy, making the courses even more interesting to create and watch, but easily omitable if you want to stay true to the mechanics of the original.

The ability to draw your lines definitely adds a dimension of fun to the game, but if you have an unsteady hand, your lines will form like the scrawlings of an armless monkey. Who’s had a bit too much to drink. And is choking on a bar pretzel. It’s bad news, and it means bad things for your delicate little rider, who weighs as much as an anorexic hummingbird, based on how often he’s flung from his sled. Fortunately, the game also has a Bezier Curve drawing mode, where the line artist can draw a perfectly straight line and then drag a few points around to stretch it into a curve, not unlike creating something in Adobe Illustrator.

So, the drawing mode is a smart, exciting addition, once you get used to the technical aspects of drawing the lines. Much of the game turns out to be making tiny, slight adjustments to the line paths, over and over, until everything syncs up just right - and since there’s no quick ‘undo’ button, one needs to click from the pen tool to the eraser tool every time you need to make a change, instead of something intuitive like pressing a button to immediately convert the pen to an eraser or to take your drawing a step back. If you’ve constructed a long course, you’ll need to watch the whole thing over again each time you make a change.

Another addition in Line Rider 2 incorporates the Wi-Fi capabilities of the DS. Now, line artists can go online via their DS interface and share their creations with people around the world, whereas the original website didn’t permit this. Tracks can be quickly downloaded (without a preview, unfortunately) and played with in Freestyle Mode or Puzzle Mode. If they’re not suitably awesome, they can also be quickly deleted. At the time of this writing, the online selection was very sparse, but it’ll certainly pick up once more folks purchase the game. I’m a collector of the DS’ Wi-Fi games, since social-interaction-via-Gameboy is still a novel concept to me, and online, pure, competitive Tetris is pure euphoria.

One innovation that would have completely rocked my world would have been the ability to share your DS creations with a worldwide audience via a YouTube compressor or something. As it stands, your audience remains trapped within the DS - which is still an improvement over ‘yourself and your inattentive cat’.

Story Mode pushes your sled guy through a series of puzzles, all of which can be solved with a few cleverly placed lines. These levels are intermixed with some animated cut scenes of cartoonish sledder kids trying to sabotage one another, since the world of competitive sledding is brutal. 515 deaths last year - and that was just from fighting at the ski lodge. The scenes don’t really add too much, since Line Rider’s total lack of story is what keeps it pure and artful, but I’m also in my mid-20s, so perhaps the appeal is lost on me.

Puzzle Mode allows you to create puzzles for the rest of the world to solve, via Wi-Fi upload. The designs start to become fairly intricate, with the involvement of foreground and background details, camera angles and special effects, another interesting (if mostly ornamental) addition.

The translation from online to Nintendo is pretty successful, but the learning curve might be a little disorienting for the oldschool Line Riders. I’m compelled to create either some kind of elaborate course that prominently features dinosaurs fighting robots, or something vulgar and suggestive to give to the world. Even with the endless possibilities, I’ll restrain myself.