Tank Wars

Do you like the explosions? Of course, like! That is why such popularity always get the game where you can smash everything and everyone around. A well-known example is the Worms series, but in many of the so-called forerunners of Tank Wars worms, pyromania blooms even more violently: there is only one screen, up to 10 enemies, and the explosions are so powerful that most rounds end in 2-3 moves.

The game has a lot of settings. You can choose opponents (with different algorithms: from "stupid", which most often just kills itself, to "super-killers", which always falls), adjust management, add people-players (yes, playing with someone else is more interesting!) , set the number of rounds, add corrections to the wind and so on. After this, the game itself begins. Everything looks quite simple and schematic, but nice: the standard MCGA mode (256 colors, 320 by 200) barely allows you to fit 10 tanks on a screen that hosts a randomly generated monotonous green landscape without any frills (i.e., it is uniquely projected onto horizontal axis, unlike Worms). For the sake of a small variety, a background was added, or rather conditional (blue sky, stars), or vice versa — eerie psychedelic circles made with palette cycling throughout the VGA palette. Quite cruel to the player, but there is something in it (for me personally, this has become one of the most memorable things in the game since I played it in the early 1990s).

Control of the game is very simple: turn the gun with left-right arrows, adjust the strength of the shot (from 0 to 1000) using the up-and-down arrows, select the weapon (TAB) and shoot (space). The shots, depending on the level, can either be reflected from the walls or fly off the screen. For killing opponents, they earn points for which you can buy weapons between levels. And the weapon from Worms here seems childish prattle: there are ways that you can easily kill everyone around you, including yourself (for example, by hitting the enemy with a 5 megaton atomic bomb). The piquancy is added by the fact that after the "death" tanks can also explode in a different way, so if there are a lot of rivals, then it is in the order of things that they destroy each other along the chain, and the move does not even reach you. Another interesting example is the effect of "disappearing land". The fact is that if there is no surface under your tank, then it falls, damaging it. A weapon with the abbreviation CRI (there are several modifications) randomly removes pixels from the ground at the point of impact of the projectile. Here, too, there are several subtleties, for example, that the remaining patches of earth can continue to “hang in the air” even a turn, for which the balance of battle may well change radically. And there is a mass of such small subtleties and tactics in the game, to talk about everything — only to spoil the impressions of independent study.

Kenny Morse Tank Wars is one of the reference examples of a shareware game: technically everything is done comfortably and without bugs, many possibilities, and most importantly, addictive gameplay, and even with multiplayer!

PS: The game was developed for several years, the last known version, 3.2, was released in mid-1992.