I've never quite been sold on game physics. Do they -- will they -- make games play better? Are they mainly going to be used to simply make games look better? And is that good enough? I spent the year asking people and have finally filed a report of my findings. The link's below, but here are some meaty highlights. To mix metaphors..

I asked Shigeru Miyamoto. He said: "I think it really depends on how the physics are used. If all you’re doing is trying to harness processing power to create these physics models that simply replicate the real world. I don’t really see the appeal in that. But if you’re taking advantage of the physics to create new worlds or new types of interactions we’ve never seen before that’s where I see the appeal of phsyics would lie. So while a lot of people would say the Wii console doesn’t have the physics powerhouse that some of the other consoles do I’ve actually found that in the developments with software so far that we actually have plenty of physics processing power to do the types of creative physics that we want to do with our games."

I asked "Turok" producer Josh Holmes (who didn't make the final article -- sory Josh!). He said: "It’s about trying to pauy ooff moments in a realistic fashion. At the same time we’re not about to introduce a puzzle were you’re stacking boxes on one side to weight one side of something because that’s not something you might naturally do in the real world. When you see game designers taking advantage of physics at that level it almost breaks the game reality for me personally as a player."

I could go on, but I'm not going to here. Read comments from people at Havok, "Heavenly Sword", "Assassin's Creed" and more over in my MTV News GameFile physics spectacular.