Scorched Earth (video game)
| Scorched Earth | |
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| Developer(s) | Wendell Hicken |
| Version | 1.5 |
| Platform(s) | DOS |
| Release date(s) | 1991, 1992, 1995 |
| Genre(s) | Artillery game, Strategy game[1] |
| Mode(s) | Single player, Multiplayer (Hotseat) |
| System requirements
VGA monitor |
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Scorched Earth is a popular shareware artillery video game, which is a subgenre of strategy game.[1] The game was developed in the DOS era, originally written by Wendell Hicken (using Borland C++ and Turbo Assembler),[2] in which tanks do turn-based battle in two-dimensional terrain, with each player adjusting the angle and power of their tank turret before each shot.
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[edit] Description
Scorched Earth is one of many games in the genre of "turn-based artillery games". Such games are among the earliest computer games, with versions existing for mainframes with only teletype output. Scorched Earth, with a plethora of weapon types and power-ups, is considered the modern archetype of its format.
Its slogan, "The Mother of all Games", was coined in 1991, during the Gulf War, after Saddam Hussein threatened the U.S. that if they stepped on Iraqi soil, it would be "The Mother of all Battles"[3] .
The game has a wide variety of customization options from gravity and wind to money and meteorite showers, and a similarly large pool of different payloads, allowing for a large amount of entirely different situations.
In addition to the possible in-game changes, the text messages the AI players can display before firing (e.g. "I shall smash your ugly tank!") and before dying (e.g. "Join the army, see the world they said") are read in two plain text files, TALK1.CFG and TALK2.CFG, respectively, free for creative users to change or translate.
The weapons range from small missile rounds to MIRV warheads. All weapons can be upgraded with tracers which allow the player to more accurately adjust the trajectory on their next turn. In addition to conventional warheads, there is also such ordnance as napalm, wildly bouncing bombs, and earth weapons, allowing the player to dump dirt on other tanks or to remove ground from beneath them. A tank which is covered with dirt has to shoot itself free and may get damaged in the process; one which falls from too high a level may be destroyed. A variety of utilities, such as deflector shields, recharge batteries, and tank parachutes, make it much harder to score a kill with a single hit even with the more bizarre and advanced weapons, adding another dimension to the game's tactics.
Projectiles can be manipulated in their flight-path by wind, shields and guidance systems, and sometimes have partially random effects. Walls may have a bounce, wrap-around, or no effect, as may the ceiling. As the player advances in the game, he can afford more and more powerful weapons, but so can his opponents.
The game can be played against up to nine other human players and/or computer-controlled ones. A broad range of differently skilled player types is offered by the program. If the player-controlled tanks are destroyed before the others, the AI-controlled players continue to battle each other, effectively turning Scorched Earth into a zero-player game.
There is also a similar game from the same era called Tank Wars and another on the Commodore Amiga computer system called Scorched Tanks. Tank Wars was made in 1990 by Kenny Morse, a year before Scorched Earth. Commodore also released a similar version in their educational software catalog called Artillery.
[edit] Exploits
There are two main techniques which can be applied to exploit bugs for an easy victory in Scorched Earth.
The first is to take a movable tank and invest in plenty of fuel. If the player moves left then right over and over again, the tank will rise into the air. While doing this it will dig through dirt and the shields of other tanks. Projectiles may then be fired through the hole thus created. This can also be used to undermine other tanks and cause them to take falling damage.
The second, which relates to the use of the first, is to exploit the characteristics of napalm, in combination with those of shields. If napalm can be poured through a hole in a tank's shield (sometimes a napalm shell itself will do this) the shield will hold the napalm in next to the affected tank causing the maximum amount of damage for the napalm shot.
[edit] Versions
There are several versions known to exist, the earliest being 1.0b (where "b" is presumed to mean "Beta"). Public versions include 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 and lastly, 1.5, which was released in 1995.
Although, graphically, 1.0B looks similar to the later versions, in-game, its menus were completely different. It was also not as feature-rich and contained some different AI class names, such as "Rifleman" and "Twanger" (which may have been changed, as they were also AI class names in the slightly earlier artillery game, Tank Wars).
Starting with 1.0 in 1991, the game became Shareware and was graphically the same Scorched Earth that is widely known of today.
In Version 1.1, more weapons were added, such as Napalm, Smoke Tracers, and Liquid Dirt as well as Joystick support and two new death animations among other things. Also in 1.1, a modem icon was added with the intention of including some form of net play in a following version, however, this feature was never implemented.
Nearly a year later, in 1992, version 1.2 was released which added, among other minor things, a new death animation and Synchronous firing mode. Versions 1.21 and 1.22 were released as very minor updates, both of which listed themselves as version 1.2 in-game and in all documentation except for the "readme" file. In early 1993, version 1.23 was released, and it identified itself as such in-game.
The last version (1.50) was not released until 1995. In 1.5, the registration feature was removed and instead, only a shareware version was released freely while the registered version could only be obtained through a mail order. Purchasing the registered version allowed the player to use the triple-turreted tank and added 25 scanned mountains as well as removing the shareware reminders. New to this version were lasers and SuperMags as well as a couple of new skies and the introduction of scanned mountain ranges.
[edit] Scorched Earth in the present
There have also been numerous clones made (and are still being made) such as Atomic Tanks,[4] Nasty Armoured Tanks of War,[5] xscorch (Open Source clone),[6] Scorched 3D, which attempt to modernize the gameplay and graphics, and others such as Charred Dirt[7] that take a different approach by using a unique graphical style. In 1999 a clone written in Java was released called Scorched Earth 2000[8] which ran from a web browser and supported online multiplayer games. There are also several variants, such as WarheadsSE in which the players fire missiles between planets, with the trajectories curving as missiles pass through gravitational fields.
It was hinted in December 2005, by the original developer, that more news on the official version would surface soon.[9] He mentioned this again in February 2006 in his blog.[10] This is suspected of being related to a suggested "Scorched Earth project" that the developer has mentioned in his blog in March 2006.[11]
The Scorched 3D remake is faithful to the original, including the same economics, physics, weapons, and environments as the original. It includes full network support, a headless server daemon and a server browser from within the game. Its official site offers a CD containing all versions of the registered game (except for 1.0b). The CD also includes a .MTN builder to create your own Scorched terrains and an HTML version of the version 1.5 manual.[12] The website also has special scholastic site licenses for the game.[13]
[edit] References
- ^ a b "MobyGames Summary for Scorched Earth". MobyGames. http://www.mobygames.com/game/scorched-earth. Retrieved 2007-12-31.
- ^ "Tools section" of the Scorched Earth FAQ
- ^ COWELL, ALAN (September 22, 1990). "CONFRONTATION IN THE GULF; Leaders Bluntly Prime Iraq For 'Mother of All Battles'". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/22/world/confrontation-in-the-gulf-leaders-bluntly-prime-iraq-for-mother-of-all-battles.html. Retrieved 4 May 2011.
- ^ "Atomic Tanks page at SourceForge"
- ^ "N.A.T.O.W. page at SourceForge"
- ^ "xscorch web site"
- ^ "Charred Dirt web site"
- ^ "Scorched Earth 2000 browser based Java clone"
- ^ MusicIP Forums
- ^ "Whicken's blog" February 2006
- ^ "Whicken's blog" March 2006
- ^ "Official Scorched Earth web site"
- ^ "Scorched Earth FAQ"
