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September 17, 2005
Scorched Earth
When I was a deviant I spent many hours playing useless video games. My favorites fell into 4 categories--First Person Shooter (Wolfenstein), Real Time Strategy (Command and Conquer, later Starcraft), addictive puzzle games (Minesweeper, Tetris), and a last category that did not seem to live into the modern gaming era: Ballistic.
Ballistic games basically pit players in small vehicles that may or may-not move picking angles and powers to lob artillery shells at each other. The main differentiating feature of these games were how cool and dramatic the explosions and weapons were. The king of these games was Scortched Earth.
"Scortch," as we called it, was introduced to me by a long lost friend by the name of Matt Hudson. I spent entirely too many hours of my life in Matt's parent's basement lobbing "diggers" and "rollers" at him, while consuming gallons of Mountain Dew and perfecting the ancient art of sticking the mini-toilet-plunger to the duct work from across the basement (don't laugh, its harder than you think).
Today I was looking through the open source games and found some interesting things. I got a free version of Doom calld "PRBoom" that replicates the game nicely, though I remember the graphics being better while under the influence of caffine. I then found a Real Time strategy game called "Boson" that looks quite promising and was requesting 3D designers to help create little game pieces. This page referred me to the following site, which is probably the most childishly inspiring page I've seen in years.
Matt Hudson, if he's still alive out there, and Jarrad will probably share some of my gittiness--the rest of you will have to develop it for yourself.
Posted by james at September 17, 2005 12:46 PM
Comments
You bastard. Bastard. I have my first line of tests next week, and of course the first casualty of Scorched Earth is my willpower. I've got to check it out...bout time you updated too.
I haven't tried the plunger thing in years, but when I saw the show Stomp and they used plungers as musical instruments, I immediatley thought of us down in Matt's basement flinging one around and sticking it to the ceiling.
Posted by: uncle Jarrad at September 18, 2005 08:36 PM