Tech: An Artillery Game Retrospective

Turn-based artillery games have a long and storied history, dating back to some of the earliest computer programs. It's a simple concept - two or more tanks are on a landscape of some sort, and they take turns blasting away at each other by calling in the angle and power of each shot. Real-world physics (gravity and wind) often complicate things considerably. Here are some of the noteworthy artillery games I've played:

Gorillas

Imagine if King Kong had access to explosive bananas - that's the wacky premise of "Gorillas," one of the games Microsoft included with the MS-DOS 5 version of QBasic in order to demonstrate the IDE. Two players toss bananas at each other across a city skyline, with predictable results:



It's a simple game by even the standards of the early 1990s. Since there's no real way to gauge how powerful your shots are (the cityscape has no scale, and the "Velocity" input is thus meaningless), it's mostly trial and error. There's a certain nostalgic satisfaction to the whole affair, though, so try it out here.

Scorched Earth

"Scorched Earth" was one of the early successes of the shareware era, notable for its wealth of customization options (you could buy different items to equip your tank, like missiles and parachutes). It was a favorite in our 6th grade homeroom class, blending cheeky humor (one of the most ) and mass destruction in a heady cocktail (one of the most popular weapons was the "Funky Bomb"):



I still remember being surprised when I found out that MIRVs were actually real weapons, capable of devestating multiple cities. Sometimes truth is stranger (and scarier) than fiction.

Worms

This is undoubtedly the most popular artillery game ever made, with the latest iterations appearing on the Wii and Xbox 360. "Worms" pits cuddly anthropomorphic earthworms against each other in a fight to the death:



As the series went on, it got more cutesy, but the first entries of the series were pretty dark and, I think, funnier as a result. In any case, the "Worms" series is unique because it allows skilled players to reposition themselves around the map using devices like the Jetpack or the Ninja Rope. The ensuing wars were often won and lost by effective tactics rather than brute force, since even a basic grenade can knock off a worm's health by almost 50%.