Scorched Earth 2000 is back

(scorch2000.com)

65 points | by meshko 1 hour ago

8 comments

  • sbinnee 6 minutes ago
    OMG. One of my favorite games. It was fun to explore all the weapons and utilities with my brother.
  • kylemaxwell 1 hour ago
    I played the hell out of the original DOS game during high school in 1992 (or thereabouts, it's been a while.)
    • walrus01 23 minutes 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.
    • The_Blade 39 minutes 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 24 minutes ago
      Same! I remember playing this during my Borland C++ for DOS class in school. Good times.
    • api 45 minutes 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 55 minutes 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 51 minutes ago
      yup, it was a java applet. Stopped working when Java in the browser died.
      • fullstop 15 minutes 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 48 minutes 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 46 minutes ago
          you probably got damage. If stuck like this, go to menu and select "mass kill"
          • Forgeties79 28 minutes ago
            Wow that’s a lot to unpack lol
  • meshko 1 hour 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 1 hour ago
      Doing the lords work, as they say. Thank you for sharing.
  • rickcarlino 14 minutes ago
    I did not realize Pocket Tanks was a derivative work.
    • compiler-guy 2 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 1 minute 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 7 minutes ago
      Haha, same
  • ChrisArchitect 29 minutes ago
    A related page:

    Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games

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

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

    • meshko 14 minutes ago
      yeah, that's the original. It is better than this remake but no multiplayer.
  • Forgeties79 29 minutes 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 12 minutes ago
    LOL nostalgic