I liked this game so much I created a clone of it in my teens.
Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games
111–120 of 146 posts
Re: Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games
#112I love the aesthetic of VGA DOS games like this.
The 90s DOS games had great taste. They were severely limited by tech and they still managed to make colour and art style choices that fit together beautifully. Heart Of China had some iconic images that still stick with me. Prince of Persia one had great animations for the time it came out.
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.
Re: Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games
#113I played the hell out of this in like 1991-1993. I really enjoyed figuring out useful combos to bypass shields. Like, instead of attacking your opponent's shields directly, you could dig a hole under them, and fill it with napalm, or send rollers under their magnetic deflector. Most of the people I played against found this kind of thing surprising.
I had no idea it was so popular - it certainly was in my household. I remember finally upgrading to a colour monitor.
The ‘cheat’ mode of assigning yourself max cash great for practice. Also, firing a MIRV straight up at max power with wrap around walls would spread them out across the field of play.
I’m not sure if it was just the copy I had, but there was an NPC called ‘bastard’ that was really tough to beat.
Re: Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games
#114I spent so many hours on it. Then I got my first job, and one co-worker I worked closely with was: Wendell Hicken. One day he casually mentioned, I wrote Scorch, was a lot of fun to program. Only then I connected dots.
I was in college when this game was released. I spent countless hours playing with my roommates. 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 a clone on the iOS marketplace, but it has ads - I’d easy pay $7.99.
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.
Re: Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games
#115Similar games others have mentioned aren't necessarily clones of this one--the genre comes from the 1970s: 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…
[deleted]
Re: Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games
#116I never could understand the appeal of later Worms games, Scorched Earth was far superior. It has some minor flaw in it's economy: winning player had so much more money to spend on equipment, that it was very hard for a loser of a round to ever catch up, even with a far superior shooting.
Worms was my brother and my jam. We would play it all the time, and would give the worms personalities, and sometimes even avoid using a weapon with one worm because another worm was the "expert grenade thrower" or ninja or digger or whatever.
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.
Re: Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games
#117Pet theory: Scorched is just a mod of GORILLA.BAS.
I have been thinking about GORILLA.BAS this entire thread. I don't remember playing Scorched Earth as a kid, but somehow must have been exposed to it to make that connection 30 years later. 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 G…
I remember seeing the source code way too young to really understand any of it, but working out enough to flip a single boolean that controlled the sun. Usually the sun had a happy face, and if you hit the sun with a banana it turned surprised. I was very pleased that I was able to change it so that the surprised and happy faces were flipped.
Re: Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games
#118I loved scorched earth as a kid. It was great fun. I must find a copy and play it again.
Re: Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games
#119So this game has been done and redone a million times, and is one of the first games I ever played on Bally Astrocade. I believe it was called Artillery? Does that ring a bell for anyone here? We didn't have the actual cartridge, but an eprom that had the binary flashed to it. My dad was into that sort of thing back then.
Re: Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
My guess would be Mode X, it was quite popular in games at the DOS/VGA times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_X
The default resolution is 360x480x256 colour, a variant on mode X also described by Abrash in his Dr Dobbs articles!
We didn't had access to that book then on, but it was described in various .txt files from demo groups, though I've found them later (like arround assembly 93 or 94 came out)