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.)
4 replies on “Accordion Guy Advent Calendar, Day Three: Scorched Earth!”
I don’t really know if it’s a classic but there is glider
http://homepage.mac.com/calhoun/glider.html
and dosbox for scorching mac os x
http://dosbox.sf.net
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)
Nice! Scorched Earth… that takes me back.
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