Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games
whicken.com
whicken.com
The game holds up to this day for boys under 12. After that, maybe they expect better graphics, but my experience is that interest wanes.
There’s probably quite a few retro games that could be rebooted from this era - it has inter generational appeal among older players who grew up in that era. Might work well on the Apple Arcade ecosystem.
It had a cheat code, so if you set the power to a certain amount it would shoot through the grass
BRB, installing tank wars again. What was the cheat code?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game
> Artillery games are two or three-player (usually turn-based) video games involving tanks (or simply cannons) trying to destroy each other. The core mechanics of the gameplay is almost always to aim at the opponent(s) following a ballistic trajectory (in its simplest form, a parabolic curve).
> Artillery games are among the earliest computer games developed; the theme of such games is an extension of the original uses of computer themselves, which were once used to calculate the trajectories of rockets and other related military-based calculations.[citation needed]
> Early precursors to the modern artillery-type games were text-only games that simulated artillery entirely with input data values. One of the earliest known games in the genre is War 3 for two or three players, written in FOCAL Mod V by Mike Forman (date unknown). The game was then ported to TSS/8 BASIC IV by M. E. Lyon Jr. in 1972. Ported again to [...]
My middle school offered a BASIC class in the early 90s, which was my first experience with programming (besides LOGO in elementary school). In hindsight, the teacher was a complete blessing to us, as he 'let' us modify and play GORILLA.BAS and similar BASIC games during our time in class. We thought we were getting away with playing video games in school, but those experiences were setting the seeds for some of our future careers.
Great memories.
I found the floppy and tried it on a number of different 90's PC's which originally had floppy drives and were still around.
Plus the newer PC's still had the often-neglected floppy connector in use to maintain compatibility.
I could swear that the more powerful the PC, the slower the program ran.
I thought of Wendell Hicken as a programming god. The idea that one person could make a thing like that was amazing to me. I also remember version 1.5, the last version, having a phone shaped button for modem play and being stoked that modem play might come. Super nostalgia, here's an interview with Wendell: https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/03/scorched/
The quotes from the tanks were very entertaining to me.
I didn't have a lot of friends, haha.
Even still sometimes I fire up Pocket Tanks on my PC, although the overall presentation is a bit watered down compared to Scorched Tanks, the core experience is still there. Would be nice to see a true remake of Scorched Tanks someday.
(Dammit brain, I forget all sorts of useful things, but why did I remember that?)
Years of my life sunk into Scorched Tanks. As an Amiga child, I have no MS DOS nostalgia. But I am pretty sure Scorched Tanks was a decent alternative.
The silliness, combined with the ability to rapidly traverse terrain (but only if you were skillful) was what made it fun, and more like a game than a math problem.
I can't recall whether we felt that the best of the series was Worms 2 or Armageddon, but they were in the sweet-spot of the properly-bendy ninja rope, and cartoony and funny but no weird 3d stuff.
Also all the shooting/dying quotes can be changed, which was very amusing to us 10-year-olds.
If you haven't played this, throw them a dollar, play it, then once you realise what utter brilliance it is send them more money to taste.
The only thing whose dueling ridiculosity is on a similar level of amazing is the early Worms games.
I found shellshock live on steam, I found that it was the closest experience to playing with my friends in high school. We even got to play a couple of rounds over the Internet.
My teacher's response to seeing my game was 'your explosions don't look as good as they do in scorched earth'. He was a charlatan who I already didn't respect so the feedback didn't really affect me, but I can only imagine how crushed I would have been if I was one of those who were naturally respectful of authority...I honestly have no idea what I would be doing, since I don't really have any other useful skills.
Fast forward to now, and I played this game in an online emulator with my teenage sons, having just as much fun as back then lobby Funky Bombs and Baby Nukes at each other. My children love the Insult-On-Death mode and random wall actions. They have just as much fun with these tiny EGA pixels as with the modern graphics masterpieces like Elden Ring and Halo Infinite.
This can be installed on debian/ubuntu with a quick "sudo apt-get install atanks", but is available on windows and other platforms too.
Every pixel in Scorch's tank pixel art feels so well placed, combined with the quips it's like they all had their own character. The tank selection screen could have had an empty landscape picture behind it, like the main menu, but Whicken chose instead a scrolling background that gave a great sense of movement and amped you up for the coming PC Speaker squealing carnage. Of course you get the easy benefit of the whole design being internally consistent because it's made by one guy, which makes it feel like a cohesive whole.
At that time you may have a copy of turboc/watcomc but not a watcom tablet and a copy of paintshop. Also pixel art is a particular artistic skill most people do not have. So you were reduced to poking data into some terrible shareware editor with an awful color palate . I made my own spacewar style game at one point. I was reduced to putting bytes into a file to get the gradients right on the hulls of the ship. Oh and each gradient is stealing a color from my limited palate of 240 colors (16 were reserved, for whatever reason at the time). You want higher res you are now talking VGA. But the trade off was resolution for color. So you could have 640x480 but only 16 colors. Or you could have 320x240 but 256 but a blocky mess. This was when a VGA card might have 1MB of memory total (usually less, unless you paid for something fancy). Throw in page flipping (which you really really want) and you are out of room on the card.
Scorched Earth was more about how many crazy weapons you could make and throw at each other with fun generated effects.
We can now look back at the whole catalog and see what was really good at the time. With collections like eXoDOS. You will find a good 95% of the games are very poor if compared to what you can get today. If you bought something like this on steam today you would be thinking what is up with this junk. Back in the 90s though it was a fun bit of software.
AAA games like Lemmings and Wolfenstein 3D were not entirely that way, even if they still used some of the same UI paradigms (think: the hardware detection screen when starting wolf3d, or the action selection in Lemmings)
Elden Ring gets pretty close, but that’s a solo experience more akin to the kind of influence Ocarina of Time had than Doom, I guess.
Maybe I’m just old and cynical.
Both are a lot of fun, though!
http://www.whicken.com/werecat/overview.html
The Werecat Rules Engine is a freely available framework for building and evaluating simple, hierarchical rule structures. Using Java reflection, you can easily plug in your own data and functions to create a highly dynamic rules-based structure with very little coding effort.
Btw. I find Worms much more enjoyable/funnier, though it's pretty much same concept.
edit: same year was also released Lemmings, which blows graphics/UI of this out of water, SE feels like 80's, Lemmings at least 5-10 years younger, while both were released same year
for instance they released same year also Lemmings which has much better UI and feels much more revolutionary and many years younger than SE
It did seem like a nice project!
BTW leap frog bomb was the best.
That's literally exactly what the link is!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Babylon
The press, I distinctly recall, liked to call it. "The mother of all guns" However I am unable to find a citation in the 30 seconds I spent looking for it.