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Accordion Guy Advent Calendar, Day Three: Scorched Earth!

For day 3 of the Accordion Guy Advent calendar, I present Scorched Earth [633K, .zip file] “the mother of all games” as it was called back in 1994.

Scorched Earth is a tank game

in which up to 10 players — any of which can be human- or

computer-controlled — lob various kinds of artillery shells at each

other. You start the game with basic shells, but as you win, you gain

money, which allows you to buy better (and weirder) weapons, from

tracer rounds, to “liquid dirt” to “funky bombs” and so on. You also

start off defenceless, but money will allow you to buy force fields and

magnetic deflectors. It’s a simple game, but even today, it’s downright

addictive.

This is the unregistered edition of the last version of the game,

version 1.5. Registering the game unlocks more features (you can find

out more about registration here). Although it’s an old DOS game, it still plays just fine on my Windows XP box.

The game is in a .zip file; I recommend you unzip into your “Program

Files” directory. To play the game, double-click the SCORCH.EXE file.

(I’ll try and find a classic game for those of you who have Macs. The problem is that the classics won’t run on OS X machines.)

Joey deVilla

View Comments

  • Re: OS X. Yes they can. But only if you have a machine capable of running OS 9 (like my G4). When I got my first Mac I had a lot of fun with a tank game called Spectre

    All of the newest machines are designed to run OS X only. This is why I find it very unlikely that the next OS X (Macintel) will be able to run on pcs when you can't even get a Mac platform to run on a Mac (the developer version had to be widely compatible as the next generation of Macs -- for which new OS is designed -- don't exist yet)

  • Hey man, just thought I'd let you know of an update to this classic. http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/ is an AMAZING game that I've gotten hours and hours of enjoyment from. You should download it. Now, even. It's so much cooler than the original it's hard to describe!

    Jeremy

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