8 Popular Video Games The Industry Doesn’t Make Anymore

7. Games That Had Fun With Physics

Following Half-Life 2's expert demonstration of Havok physics, everybody and their fourth cousin started developing titles where the environment itself was a weapon, or you could watch enemies pirouette through the sky with well-placed explosives.

It was such an enjoyable time, and Hitman 2: Silent Assassin adopted the tech, as did Max Payne 2, and the ludicrously fun Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy made a whole game out of it. Crushing enemies against walls, flying around on crates or taking people out with a tossed piece of scaffolding to the face - few things were more fun.

Then it became the go-to mentality that canned, hand-crafted animations were king, and Havok physics largely took a back seat.

You saw a version of this return with LucasArts' Euphoria engine in The Force Unleashed, and Rockstar hybridise the two in their RAGE engine tech, but in terms of games where large portion of the appeal is experimenting with objects, enemies and physics-based weapons?

They are long gone.