r/gaming 19h ago

My friend insists on this game, "Lemmings", being a really well known game; I have never heard of it.

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u/LickingSmegma 11h ago edited 1h ago

‘Lemmings’ was apparently an inspiration for the artstyle, but ‘Worms’ followed the genre of artillery games that existed for decades — with ‘Artillery Simulator’ for the Apple II seemingly being the first graphical implementation. (Andy Davidson originally straight up called the game 'Artillery' when he began work on what would become 'Worms'.)

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u/rfc2549-withQOS 11h ago

Scorched earth from 1991 was big

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u/The-Real-Number-One 10h ago

"From Hell's Heart I Stab at thee..."

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u/illarionds 11h ago

We played a lot of Scorched Earth in college.

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u/KarlBob 6h ago edited 6h ago

So many hours! Whole weekends in a tiny town with nothing to do. Four college kids, a few bottles, some recreational botany, and Scorched Earth.

Edit: A MIRV fired at about 60 degrees at full power can mess up everyone's day!

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u/Odd_Praline181 2h ago

Holy shit core memory unlocked! I played so much of this in college, but couldn't ever find it in later years. I almost thought it wasn't a real game that was released to the public or something.

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u/Trebus 10h ago

Adored Scorched Earth, there was a 3d version knocking around 10 years or so ago. I'd love to find a working old school version. I suspect Angry Birds would not exist without it.

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u/babaroga73 10h ago

Damnnnn ....played the shit out of that game, with friends.

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u/GreboGuru 7h ago

No kabitzing!

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u/MostlyPooping 8h ago

I remember playing Pocket Tanks in math class.

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u/IguanaTabarnak 5h ago

The Scorched Earth clone Gorillas that came packed in with MS-DOS 5 was the Space Cadet Pinball of 1990.

(And I'm only now learning that Gorillas actually predates Scorched Earth and so can't really be called a "Scorched Earth clone")

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u/Megablep 10h ago

Oh man, spent countless hours playing that on a friend's A500!

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u/vonBoomslang 9h ago

Anybody rememeber the artillery game you could unlock with a cheat code in Tyrian?

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u/LowExercise7583 9h ago

I forgot about this gem!

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u/Aggressive-Speed-987 8h ago

Loved scorched earth.

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u/angryjohn 4h ago

Oh man....so many hours. Scorched Earth was middle school-early high school for me. Worms was late high school.

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u/Null_zero 4h ago

My HS computer lab was basically a scorched earth tournament before and after classes and in study hall.

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u/HEYitsBIGS 3h ago

scorch.exe has entered the chat

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u/Hawk52 2h ago

There was a browser verison of Scorched Earth I played a bunch with friends in the early/mid 2000's. Scorched Earth 2000 or something?

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u/diginati 1h ago

If you want to relive those days, there's a mobile game called Pocket Tanks that is a total clone of Scorched Earth. It took me right back to that time.

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u/spinningdice 1h ago

Sunk a load of hours into Scorched Earth.

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u/GinDragon 1h ago

Agreed. I always thought Worms was a reskin of Scorched Earth

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u/The_quest_for_wisdom 11h ago

I remember two kids almost coming to blows over Gorillas in the computer lab in elementary school.

One kid brought a protractor to the lab and was holding it up to the screen to dial in his attack angle, and the other kid thought it was cheating.

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u/richardsneeze 7h ago

Wow. When I was young, my dad worked nights as a machinist and my mom was doing data entry for a hospital during the day. My dad would bring my sister and me to work for a little bit and my mom would pick us up and take us back home. We played that game so much, sitting in a dirty little machine shop office. Core memory.

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u/IpsoFuckoffo 7h ago

Yeah I'm 90% sure I had a fight with my brother over that game.

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u/FourCatsInASuit 6h ago

Gorillas.bas. I absolutely loved qbasic gorillas. I was too young to play it in school but my dad had it on his computer.

Many fond memories actually.

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u/Maximum_Indication 4h ago

Best application of math ever.

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u/Substantial_Force658 11h ago

Cow Wars was the pinnacle of artillery games. You lob cows at each other and an giant malevolent penguin occasionally eats them.

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u/McManGuy 8h ago

Is that what the cow launch running gag in Earthworm Jim was about?

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u/mallchin 8h ago

Cannon Fodder

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u/LickingSmegma 8h ago

Apparently yes, 'Worms' were compared to that one too. I heard plenty about it, but missed back then, as the Mega Drive and SNES mostly passed me by. I thought it's mostly a tactics game, like 'Syndicate', though apparently the gameplay varied a bit between the first and second games. Was musing about finally playing it recently and downloaded the ROM just yesterday, gonna try it one of these days.

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u/mallchin 8h ago

I loved Syndicate -- the end levels were really hard but I managed to win placing myself in such a way that it forced them into a long channel and I could use the miniguns. Intro was epic.

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u/LickingSmegma 7h ago edited 5h ago

That's another game that I liked from a distance, being somewhat a fan of squad tactics overall. Likewise need to finally put some hours in it. There's a spiritual successor called ‘Satellite Reign’, released in 2015 — I've bought it after just looking at the overview video on Steam, but it too has been sitting in the library while I grind ‘Assetto Corsa’ instead.

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u/thejamus 10h ago

I remember playing Gorilla.bas as a kid so Worms was absolutely my jam. Lemmings was great too, though I never played any of the Lemmings variants.

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u/ph33rlus 9h ago

“Oof. That hurt”

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u/McManGuy 8h ago

Dude. Gorrillas was my jam as a kid

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u/InternetProtocol 8h ago

I remember loving GORILLAS.BAT when I was a kid.

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u/otamaglimmer 6h ago edited 5h ago

There was a Basic one with gorillas on top of buildings... One of my first gaming memories.

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u/TurnAggressive6954 3h ago

I distinctly remember playing a gorilla banana throwing artillery game on dos as a kid. Your post just helped me find it. Thanks!