Scorched Earth 2000 is back

103

mmeshko about 2 hours ago 32 commentsRead Article on scorch2000.com

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Discussion (32 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

rhema•34 minutes ago

9 year old me got my first "hacking" experience out of this game. With the shareware version, you could not select the ultra tank that could shoot 3 bullets for a human, but you COULD if it were the computer player.

The "hack": -start a game with a normal tank VS ultra computer player as p2. -save the game (as a file). -open the game file. -read the ASCII text and just flip which player has which text.

Now, I had my ultra tank.

stackghost•12 minutes ago

Mine was similar but it was the original C&C. Found this sketchy-ass save game editor/mod editor, proceeded to give the little Nod buggies the laser from the obelisk of light to trivialize the single player campaign.

That feeling of being the leetest of leet haxors just from editing some ini settings was pretty glorious.

leoooodias•30 minutes ago

L33T!

kylemaxwell•about 2 hours ago

I played the hell out of the original DOS game during high school in 1992 (or thereabouts, it's been a while.)

walrus01•about 1 hour ago

Early 90s DOS games were certainly quite creative. I mentally draw a dividing line between approximately the start of the era when the first Soundblaster became a common thing to find in affordable home x86 PCs, and early CD-ROM based games were also available (1991-1992), and the December 1993 release of DOOM and everything that came after. Very interesting era in the time frame in between there.

FireBeyond•36 minutes ago

Yeah, I remember our high school IT teacher buying a 486sx25 with 8MB and a CDROM ostensibly to explore multimedia in education but mostly to play Myst.

The_Blade•about 1 hour ago

same, it was a step up from dopewars, but not quite leisure suit larry which one of our friends had

years later i defeated the high score of Stephen Meek and realized with horror Oregon Trail was intended to teach patience not just dysentery damn you MECC!!

el_duderino•about 1 hour ago

Same! I remember playing this during my Borland C++ for DOS class in school. Good times.

alterom•37 minutes ago

We played Tank Wars by Kenny Morse, it's from 1990 and preceded Scorched Earth:

https://archive.org/details/TankWars_274

More unhinged fun IMO

Cpoll•9 minutes ago

They had a shared ancestor in Tanx. I also remember Tank Wars fondly.

mpyne•19 minutes ago

Yeah, this is the one that ruled my homeroom during last bit of elementary school.

sonar_un•23 minutes ago

I was gonna say, this is totally tank wars!

api•about 1 hour ago

It was fun. Was a bit younger but played it like crazy too on my 286.

Rollers! Lava! It’s like the author started with a simple tank war game and then just threw in every weird little effect they could code as a creative weapon.

There were all kinds of neat hacks.

skeeterbug•about 2 hours ago

Oh man, we played this in computer lab in high school to pass time after we were done with our assignments. I believe it was a java/flash version though (year 2000/2001)

meshko•about 1 hour ago

yup, it was a java applet. Stopped working when Java in the browser died.

fullstop•about 1 hour ago

I brought it back to life at one point as a Java Swing app for my kids, but the server side of things was still wonky. I'm glad to see that it's alive again, I had a lot of fun with this in the early 2000s.

skeeterbug•about 1 hour ago

Just played a round, think I found a bug - It was down to one other computer and myself. For some reason the power capped at 235, so neither of us could come close to hitting one another.

meshko•about 1 hour ago

you probably got damage. If stuck like this, go to menu and select "mass kill"

GavinAnderegg•19 minutes ago

Scorched Earth taught me the concept of software versions. It was the first program that I ever knowingly interacted with more than one point-release of. I had version 1.0, but a friend had version 1.2. My very young mind was boggled by the concept of software being updated.

meshko•about 2 hours ago

for the 25th anniversary (approximately) I vibecoded what i wanted to do for years -- port of the original remake (yes) to JavaScript. Alive again.

alex_anglin•about 2 hours ago

Doing the lords work, as they say. Thank you for sharing.

sbinnee•44 minutes ago

OMG. One of my favorite games. It was fun to explore all the weapons and utilities with my brother.

nickandbro•24 minutes ago

Wow! Curious how you did multiplayer over the web? What stack did you use?

rickcarlino•about 1 hour ago

I did not realize Pocket Tanks was a derivative work.

compiler-guy•40 minutes ago

Tank games like this have a long heritage. Scorch is probably the pinnacle, but I played primitive versions of this all the way back on an Apple ][.

alterom•39 minutes ago

So is Scorched Earth, it's preceded (at least) by "Tank Wars" (aka BOMB.EXE) by Kenny Morse from 1990:

https://archive.org/details/TankWars_274

nodrog3000•about 1 hour ago

Haha, same

ChrisArchitect•about 1 hour ago

A related page:

Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games

http://www.whicken.com/scorch/

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32092060)

meshko•about 1 hour ago

yeah, that's the original. It is better than this remake but no multiplayer.

Forgeties79•about 1 hour ago

Hoooooly hell I totally forgot about this. Talk about dredging up some memories. I don’t think I have thought about this game in literally 20 years.

motgnay•about 1 hour ago

LOL nostalgic