Gods of war. Something about the artillery games. Part I

As a child I adored to wreak havoc and destruction. I launched rockets from saltpeter. I threw bombs from match sulfur in the Archduke Ferdinand air. I was making carbide guns. Then he grew up, raised his rank and recruited for the construction of his younger brother, leaving himself the honorable right to bring a match to a charged gun. Then I began to fear the police officers older and smarter, at about the same time the first computer appeared in the house, and my life changed irrevocably: I discovered a world of pure destruction, safe for teenage biography and the nervous system of neighboring dogs.

Artillery shooter is a game whose gameplay is based on controlling the trajectory and range of the projectile. Everything else may or may not be variable. Targets and tools can move, projectiles - cluck and rotate angrily, and the wind - to blow in all directions at once. Today, only the lazy and my father-in-law, who prefers money for money, have not heard about the most famous representative of the Worms series, so we will recall her “poor relatives”, who left, however, a noticeable mark on the history of the genre.

Ballerburg. The king says.

^{Developer: Eckhard Cruze
Release Date: April 1987
Platform: Atari ST}
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The proud Teutons certainly make sense of artillery, but this has nothing to do with the fact that Ballerburg has become a cult game for the Atari generation. Just a pleasant coincidence, because at the time of the game's release, the author and developer studied at the school with in-depth study of computer science, and saw the core except in the museum. Two locks separated by a mountain, guns, gunpowder, wind and two kings, distributing valuable and meaningless instructions. The task is to kill the opponent's king. It was possible to play in the hotseat mode or against the computer, a little later a table was added to the game to store the results of duels.


For its genre and time, Ballerburg was considered a difficult game. The player could choose between different types of locks, distinguished by firepower and fortifications. The constantly changing wind conditions (they were followed according to the wind vane readings) were adjusted by the angle of elevation and the charge of gunpowder, and the powder required replenishment of the treasury through taxation and construction of oil derricks, up to five. The towers were expensive, but gave a sharp increase in royal finances. Of course, the towers, the moshna, and the powdery cellars of the enemy were tactical targets, making them indestructible.


The game was distributed freely, but positioned itself as donationware: the author asked to send him 20 Deutschmarks, offering the source code in return. For 12 years, Kruse received 159 such letters. In November 2001, Ascaron, one of Germany’s oldest and most successful development companies, released the 3D version of Ballerburg for PC and PlayStation without mentioning the original and the author of the first game. Lawyers of the company notified Eckhard that he was not entitled to make such a claim, and "in consolation" sent him two copies of the game for free. In Russia, the game was published in 2003 by 1C.

Ascaron went bankrupt in 2009. Professor Kruse teaches applied computer science at the Faculty of Engineering of the Cooperative State University in Mannheim. Kings still dominate their castles.

Scorched Earth. I knew your mother.

^{Developer: Wendell Hicken
Release date: 1991, 1992, 1995
Platform: MS-DOS}

In the opinion, well-established in the gaming industry, Scorched Earth has become for artillery games the same things that the Mario brothers have become for the plumbing services market of platformers: it has created a standard. SE became the first widely known game of this genre.

There is, of course, a good deal of luck: it was then that the rapid development of personal computers, the improvement of graphic and sound cards, the arrival of money and professionals in this area, and the decline of the bedroom coding era came to this area. Nevertheless, the slogan "The Mother of All Games", although it was only a free adaptation of the famous expression of Saddam Hussein, at that time embodied blatant self-reliance.



Well, okay. Mother so mother. The game really had a lot of merit. To summarize, Scorched Earth followed the Golden Rule of the Games: “easy to play, but difficult to achieve mastery”.

• First, in the game there were 7 levels of difficulty to choose from - from nerd to cyborg.
• Secondly, it was possible to adjust gravity, wind, air viscosity, the amount of money received, the number of authorized weapons of thousands of them ...
• Thirdly, there were fuel, batteries, various means of protection, guidance systems in the game, all this influenced the gameplay and all this had to be monitored. It was necessary to decide what is more useful for survival - to buy a shell more suicidal or a parachute for a more severe tank.
• Fourthly, there were about 30 types of shells in the game. thirty! Small-caliber, nuclear, with a divided warhead. Jumping, rolling, digging. And napalm, lasers and mud.
• Fifthly, unused shells could be sold.
• Sixth, the terrain in the game was randomly generated, but the player had the opportunity to move tanks to take full advantage of natural shelters.
• Seventh, conditionally free. That is, in general, for $ 10, but it could have been so, if the appearing messages that you are an unregistered user, did not spoil your digestion. There were so many people with a strong stomach that at some point the creator refused useless registration codes and began sending paid versions by mail.

From the fun facts worth mentioning the presence of the modem icon in version 1.1, which implied the possibility of online battles. This opportunity was never realized, and in version 1.2 the icon disappeared and no longer appeared. The FAQ on the official site responds to the question with humor: well, I didn’t say shmogla, I didn’t say Modem support is not yet yet.

And in version 1.1 you can find quotes from the films "Die Hard", "Surfering Nazis Must Die" and "My Scientific Project". Carefully, they swear dirty.

Scorched3D. The same, but with pearl buttons.

^{Developer: Gavin Kemp
Years of release: 2001 (v1) - 2014 (v44)
Platforms: Windows, OS X, Linux, Unix}

Separately worth mentioning is Scorched3D - a project that began as a generator of three-dimensional landscapes, turned into an independent game, created with love and respect for a two-dimensional original. Its creator, Gavin Kemp, somehow spent 8 hours in Scorched Earth, and then decided that the three dimensions would add to the game’s entertainment and create more varied tactical situations. To do this, I had to write my own game engine, since none of the existing engines at that time supported the destructible landscape. A completely normal approach for a man from Glasgow, who can be stopped only by the plague, King Edward I and the lack of whiskey, and the city, God bless his holy Mungo, did not know these troubles for a long time.



The first build appeared in 2001, and now it’s already forty-four. The first version was developed for Windows, now the game became cross-platform, acquired network multiplayer, statistics and the ability to choose the game mode: turn-based or real-time. There is a shooting mode where you can practice aiming and try all the weapons available in the game. Several game servers are open, including a server for beginners, but, unfortunately, they are not too populated, so an opponent can be expected for hours.


The game is completely free and distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL license. There is a fairly large number of mods for the game, the most popular of them is the Apocalypse Mod, several times increasing the number of weapons in the game, as well as adding new maps, locations and textures to it. At the moment, it is downloaded along with the game and is selected in the options. French developers Eurocenter in 2010, Maman swore to release a paid version, ported to the iPhone, but lost in the races, poker and French tarot.

Liero. Worm of Finland.

^{Developer: Djusa Rikkinen
Year of release: 1998
Platform: MS-DOS}

In 1997, the game Molez was released in Finland. Armed to the teeth, the evil moles buried galleries under the ground, spraying them with the guts of their relatives. Despite a certain popularity, as the project the game died in 2000, having managed to spawn a viable Liero clone, with the dynamism of the gameplay, close to the once thought, click! arcade



Only two people can play the classic version: choose for yourself 5 types of weapons from 40 possible ones and enter the battle. Each player has a rope to move around the map, she can also hook on the enemy. There are first-aid kits and a weapon change bonus, the contents of which can be set up before the game. In the game profile, control keys and the amount of health are configured. The cartridges are endless, to hell with the savings. There is gravity and there is no possibility of a network game.


The landscape is generated randomly and, with rare exception in the form of stones, will be destroyed. If you get tired of this, then the game package includes a map file with which you can create a battlefield to your taste.

The latest version of the “classic” Liero was released in 1999. The source code was lost as a result of a hard disk crash, there were no more releases, and in the first half of the 2000s, the popularity of the game began to sink into the embrace of Windows 98 for farewell beeps from the modern ship. Saved the game project OpenLiero, which was able to clone the classic version for modern operating systems, cleaned up bugs, tweaked it, and added here. But you still cannot play on the net. This is for those harsh men who love to push side by side with one car, letting out a mean nostalgic tear.

For those who by all means avoid physical contact with their relatives, not avoiding spiritual unity, they created OpenLieroX by rewriting the classic game on a new engine. Modern interface, map editor, network multiplayer and classic old "meat".



On this, perhaps, it is time to round out with the first part of my story.
To be continued .

I would be grateful for comments and comments. I would be pleased if among these games you discover something interesting for yourself. Even if it takes you a while.