Scorched Earth
Super Obsessive Game #7
Type of Game
An artillery game that’s far uglier than Worms, but far more feature-packed than Total Annihilation (no).
Release date on our machines
1991 – I’d have to dig out the game’s readme.txt file to find out the month. Not worth the effort.
Developer
A single guy alone
Publisher
The same single guy alone
Scorched Earth : available on... huh, I don't think I even need to check – this thing never made it beyond DOS and Windows 3.1.
I didn’t discover this game until long after it was released. Around 1997, verging on 1998, I’d say. At my dad’s house, the PlayStation had already taken up residence in the TV cabinet, and I was spending less and less time on the computer – a trusty 486 DX2 66 that was really starting to show its age. I only really turned it on for a few games of Taipei anymore, but the calls of Abe’s Odyssey and Resident Evil were becoming too insistent. Except that my stepmother had a nephew a year younger than me. A certain Lester Tungsten. And this lad, for reasons I can’t recall or fathom, couldn’t care less about Sony’s ultra-hyped console. He wanted to hog the PC, perhaps because that’s what we did at his house when we played The Incredible Machine, or perhaps because he thought the keyboard and mouse were cooler than the controller. I never asked him why; I just accepted that I’d have to lower my expectations, given that we were having fun anyway; the choice of games basically came down to a pretty rubbish pinball game and Lemmings, too. But one day, still with absolutely no idea why, we had a bit of a rummage through the hard drive, in the hope of unearthing some new virtual gem or other.
Bunker late than never
We found one called Ski Free, which had us in stitches. Then we clicked on an icon called scorched.exe, and well… for a moment, even I forgot all about the PS1.
Explosions, cash and a major retro twist
I seem to recall believing for a while that Scorched Earth was the first artillery game ever developed by a thinking being. I must have convinced myself of this for no reason at all, using an argument based on absolutely nothing, no doubt in the hope of impressing an imaginary friend I’ve never had. The genre has been around since the 1970s, so what can I say? Well, nothing really; I was wrong, and my fake imaginary friend has looked down on me ever since. Perhaps I’ll start talking about the gameplay to change the subject. When you say ‘artillery game’, it means you play as an avatar whose sole aim is to blast your enemies to smithereens. By shooting, throwing, or flinging all sorts of stuff at their heads. This can take the form of bananas thrown by earthworms in Worms, birds committing suicide on pigs in Angry Birds, or more or less invisible projectiles fired by more or less blown-up tanks in Scorched Earth. The concept of the force with which you fire already exists in this game, as do wind and other parameters such as gravity, potential meteorite strikes, or the ability to track the trajectories of all launched missiles.
I remember struggling to get hold of those measly little missiles at the start, but after about ten sessions, you’re swamped with cash – so much so that you can buy anything without a second thought. And honestly, you’d have to get up at the crack of dawn to get your hands on every single piece of equipment available. Between the accessories that make life easier, like parachutes, missile guidance systems, shields… and the endless array of weapons, like napalm, missiles of various types and sizes, the thing that bounces all over the place, the rollers that tumble down slopes and explode at the first obstacle, the shells that dig tunnels to blow up enemies from below… Yeah, we don’t get any old ladies, stone donkeys or super sheep, but strangely enough, I didn’t miss them. And I can’t even imagine what the old lady would look like rendered in Scorched Earth’s graphic style.
If, by any chance, a few killjoys still find the content too lightweight, let them be aware that there are still plenty of settings to tweak! The type of tank – stationary or not, and therefore whether it consumes fuel or not – the number of enemies and their behaviour (with a rather sophisticated AI), not to mention the many ways to influence the battlefield itself. Dropping earth to bury opponents, or simply removing a chunk of mountain, amongst other things. Incidentally, whilst a number of artillery games preceded Scorched Earth, it seems that the latter was the first to implement destructible terrain mechanics. It almost sounds like a biblical quote. “And so, he was the first to destroy both landscape and foes with a single, vengeful shell.” Almost, eh.
Music Gone Missing
I’ve never found myself in such a quandary as I am today when it comes to writing the section on a video game’s soundtrack. Scorched Earth doesn’t have even the faintest hint of a score! Not a single note of music plays, whether during the intro, during gameplay, or to accompany the end-of-game results screen! I know that a single bloke developed the whole game on his own, and that he must have had to pick his battles at some point, resorting to lines like “screw the OST” or “people who listen to music are scum.” I might be going a bit far in speculating about the chap’s anti-music-loving streak, but still, he released I don’t know how many versions of his baby, from 1991 to 1995, I think. Couldn’t he have slipped in the start of a melody between versions 1.4.7c and 1.4.7d? Even a military march, I don’t care, as long as it gives us something to drown out the awful sound effects that go with the gunfire and explosions. Blimey, I’ve never heard anything worse than that stuff. The shrill whistling of the mortars flying through the air – my brain had pushed those far down into the depths of my mind – but the mind-numbing sound of the massive explosions, I’ve never been able to forget that. It attacked my hearing at its very root, altering it forever. I’d still prefer the screech of Death in Gauntlet II. So, um... what am I going to put in this section to fill it out? The national anthem? Not in a million years. Want Love from Hysteric Ego ? Even I wouldn’t dare. Right then, that old, weird British Army song – why not?
Small Victory
OK, I’m lying a bit when I say I’d forgotten about the PlayStation by the time we discovered Scorched Earth. The truth is, I still had plenty of time to play it whilst Lester was away, even if I was careful not to let him in on that secret.
Still, the fact that I’d played Worms before didn’t stop me having a blast with Scorched Earth. I can clearly see the modern foundations it laid to make the genre so addictive. And in this case at least, I can say I was better than Lester, unlike in any other discipline he wanted to pit me against him in. Football, badminton, tennis, crab hunting on the beach, physics and chemistry marks… the bloke wouldn’t let up on a thing! Thank goodness we haven’t played Scorched Earth for years; he would inevitably have deprived me of that victory too. Perhaps he’s been training relentlessly since 1998, hoping to beat me at this game one day. Blimey, I’m going to have to come up with a whole load of excuses to dodge him for the rest of my life.
Follow Scorched Earth publications on social media !
