When one wants to implement their own “scorched Earth” policy these days, the costs can be off-putting to say the least.  There’s all the munitions, training, intel reports from reconnaissance missions, satellite imagery, not to mention fuel expenditures for transportation.  So what’s an armchair warrior to do?

They don’t get even.  They get Scorched3D!

Scorched3D

When I was growing up, that thar thingy called the Internet didn’t exist.  We had modems that dialed up to BBSs, sometimes with expensive long-distance fees applied.  And dangit, we liked it!

That was when I was first introduced to the turn-based artillery fire game of Scorched Earth.  Some of you may also remember gorilla.bas, which came with just about every computer with DOS and QBasic back in those days.

Scorched3D takes its lineage directly from the Scorched Earth game of yesteryear and make it into artform, as you can see below.  Besides being, well, 3D, it also incorporates online server play for massive devastation between players all over the world.  Terrain is deformable, and you also have a wide selection of tanks, jets, and ships to aid in implementing your own scorched Earth policy.

Click for the full size screenshots.

Deformable terrain in 3D

It's more than 2 artillery cannons with a canyon now

Visit beautiful, tropical locales...then blow them up!

Operating Systems

As of this writing, Scorched3D is up to version 42.1 and is available for the following wide swath of operating systems:

• Windows 95, 2000, ME, XP.  No word on Vista compatibility, but I would bet it runs just fine
• Mac OS X (DMG format)
• Linux: Red Hat, Mandrake, Gentoo, Debian binary packages
• Plain ol’ source code as well

There are also older versions for FreeBSD, Sparc Solaris (>= 2.8), and Slackware Linux.