Thursday, December 16, 2004

Oops

I forgot to actually publish last week's post, so here it is:

This week I've been playing Scorched 3D, which is an open-source, prettified clone of an older DOS game, Scorched Earth. The game itself is a simple yet addictive "artillery combat" sort of game. You'd almost think of it as a strategy game if you could actually control more than one unit, but at it's core it's a turn based action game, as counterintuitive as that may seem.

As the name Scorched 3D implies, yes, it is in 3D. Quite lovely 3D actually, at least for the most part. The terrain, water, and skies all look great, as do some of the explosion animations. What isn't as impressive are the models for the units. While they do a good job of looking like what they're trying to look like, they just seem to pale in comparison to everything else. Some units you'd expect, such as tanks and helicopters, sit alongside other units you'd never expect, such as the grim reaper(I don't know, maybe the rockets come out of his ass). It's a cool feature, but it's one I wouldn't have missed in favor of some more highly detailed(or at least bigger) models.

The main bread and butter of Scorched 3D is in the online play, which I haven't gotten around to trying out yet. I've taken a look at the server browser, and some pretty filled out games always seem to be happening, but I'd like to get a better hand at aiming(which is controlled by rotation, elevation, and power - quite tricky) before I take on some real competition.

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