Scorched Earth (1991)
Genres:Strategy
Themes:Warfare
Game modes:Single player, Multiplayer
Story:Blast your enemies from the face of the Earth together with Earth itself. Buy bigger weapons to crush more enemies. Get more money for crushing more enemies. And finaly buy a much more bigger weapons to crush even more enemies.
Scorched Earth is an early classic shareware artillery game that featured hot-seat multiplayer for up to 10 players, and was the spiritual predecessor to games like the Worms series.Show more
Vote to bring this game to GOG and help preserve it.183
A friend of mine had it back before our family could afford to buy a home computer. We still played this together, local multiplayer, well into the Windows 98 era when this family computer became "his" computer he could play on in his room.
Man, when you could get that deaths head round you felt like you'd won the game, only to inevitably miss by a hair.
It's just one of those games where you choose a weapon, set an aim angle and power, and watch the shot destroy parts of the level (and hopefully an enemy). But it did it really well, and it did it as one of the first in the genre. Deserves a return to life.
Scorched Earth may not have been Gorillas.BAS or Tank Wars, but it certainly was a game that lit a fire underneath the genre with it's many special graphical tricks to really show off what PCs could do. Photo scanned mountains, plasma fractal explosions, pseudorandom explosions from the funky bomb? Pure, loving chaos.
This was one of the best DOS games and party games of all time.
I tried to play it recently using DOSBox-X, but the version of the game itself had a bug which prevented Synchronous mode from working (a bug that I remember experiencing on the original). I remember there were different bugs in various versions of the game, so depending on how you play, certain versions were better than others. The Synchronous bug was only present in certain later versions of the game, but I can't remember which.
Ideal would be a GOG menu to pick which variant you want to load from between all the versions released.
Synchronous was always my favourite mode as it was the only fair mode -- everyone programmed in their shots individually, then all shots fired off simultaneously. Anyone who survived got to program in another shot. It was my preferred mode to play on.
But wow, Scorched Earth was the ultimate game for configurability! There are pages and pages and pages of settings to tweak almost every imaginable aspect of the game. I knew what every option did and had everything configured just right. I also had a custom messages text file that says a random line when your tank is destroyed. Me and my friends added to it over time, and it got pretty large. It was fun having endless movie references, like "This... is... from... Mathilda..." taken from the scene in "Leon: The Professional" when Leon is dying and he hands the corrupt cop a live grenade. It fit becau dying in Scorched Earth might kill other players nearby. Also had quotes from books, as well as rude insults, and whatever other random stuff we felt like putting in. So much fun!
I enjoyed challenging play, so I liked to play one the smaller scales of explosion size. Some of my friends just wanted to see the world burn and liked max scale -- where one nuke would destroy half the screen, you barely needed to aim except "far away from me".
So many creative weapons, tools, and mechanics to use.
Loved the game.
Think I got this on a disc with a bunch of other games on it, some of them were pretty forgettable but this was one my brother and I played the heck out of. We loved all the weird and overpowered weapons you could get and the way the battlefield could change dynamically.
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