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Imagine what would happen if the greatest analytical minds in history came back to the land of the living.
Those with a more scientific leaning might hope they could use their powers of logic and innovation to solve some of the world’s biggest problems. Gamers might secretly wish they would immediately start fighting each other in hand-to-hand combat.
Well, if you’re in the latter camp, you’re in luck. Brazilian science and culture magazine Superinteressante has released an old-school fighting game you can play on your Web browser called Science Kombat that pits some of history’s greatest scientific minds against each other in a one-on-one fighting tournament.
Enlarge ImageNikola Tesla fires a lightning bolt at Stephen Hawking and Hawking fires back with one of his wormholes.
Video screenshot by Danny Gallagher/CNET
The game features eight science-based brawlers, including Pythagoras, Tesla, Turing, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Sir Issac Newton, Stephen Hawking and Marie Curie. Each has a basic punch-and-kick move, but there are also special moves that each combatant can execute. If you’re a regular player of any of the Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter games, you should be able to figure them out pretty quick. The rest can just use the tried and true technique of button mashing.
Each combatant has taken their most famous discovery or contribution to the scientific world and turned it into a deadly weapon of destruction. For instance, Darwin can harness the powers of evolution with an “Ascent of Man” punch combo. Einstein can use his mastery over the speed of light to execute a lightning fast attack that sends him flying into his opponent’s grill. Curie uses her radium-stained hands to perform a flying uppercut and shoot a radioactive projective. You can see all the special moves in the online portfolio of Diego Sanches, an illustrator from Sao Paolo who worked on the game.
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- Einstein considered a bigger hero than Jesus, says study
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The game also has its own boss once you take down the eight regular fighters, but I’d rather not spoil the surprise. And no, it’s not your high school science teacher who made you hate science before you realized it was cool.
A game that plays this well can only get better if they add more fighters to the roster. Hopefully, the magazine will add more names like Erwin Schrodinger, who unleashes a radioactive tiger from a box, or Hippocrates, who flings the four bodily humors at his enemies.
Heck, this game could even answer a question that’s been on every science fan’s mind for a long time. Who would win in a fight: Neil deGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye the Science Guy?
