Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Classics: Scorched Earth


Scorched Earth was a multi-player PC game that was popular in the early 90's. The basic premise was you controlled a piece of artillery, on a 2D destructible landscape, mostly mountains. Your opponents were scatted around the board as well. You all took turns shooting each other with a variety of weapons. The challenge was to line up the correct angles to actually hit your target.

I remember me and a bunch of grade school friends getting playing this at a friends house. it seemed pretty amazing then, and it was a lot of fun. There were some pretty big weapons that you could purchase, which took out a large chunk of the landscape. MIRV, a warhead which separated into multiple warheads (3 I think), was always fun as well.

The reason this game came to mind is that a real-time Scorched Earth is coming to X-Box Live, called Death Tank. This game was actually on the Sega Saturn, an Easter egg in Duke Nukem 3d. They have upgraded it a lot for the X-Box hardware. The old version was turn based, so we will have to see how this one goes. I will likely download the demo at least. Check out a gameplay video:


Death Tank XBLA from Rlan on Vimeo.

3 comments:

You just completely took me down memory lane with Scorched earth. I remembered the game, but had forgotten what it was called. That game was fun, in a "back in the day" kind of way :)

Yeah, that was a great game. That Death Tank thing seems pretty cool. I want to play castle crashers first though.

I have not tried Castle Crashers yet, but have heard good things.

Have not been too interested in side-scrollers lately :-/

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