Artillery Duel

Before Scorched Earth, and long before Worms, there was this: two cannons, one hill, and a lot of arithmetic. Artillery Duel began as an Astro BASIC listing that John Perkins published in the hobbyist newsletter The Arcadian in 1980. It was picked up commercially for the Bally Astrocade and reached a wider audience in 1983, when Xonox ported it to the Atari 2600, ColecoVision, VIC-20 and Commodore 64, frequently as one half of the company's odd double-ended cartridges with a second game on the opposite connector.

What you actually do is set two numbers. Angle of elevation, then charge. Fire, watch the shell arc over the mountain that separates the two gun positions, note where it lands, hand over the controller. Your opponent does the same. There is no movement, no weapon selection, no shop between rounds. The entire game is the feedback loop between a miss and your next guess.

The wrinkle that distinguishes this version from its many contemporaries is that the ground does not stay put. Most artillery games let you bracket a target across several shots on identical terrain; here a new mountain is generated after every turn, which throws away whatever range you had just established. That is arguably more honest and definitely more annoying. Landing a hit earns a brief animation of tiny soldiers marching along the bottom of the screen, which is the whole of the reward structure.

As a solo experience it is close to pointless. The computer opponent gives you nothing to read, and the pace is glacial by any standard, including 1983's. Against a human sitting next to you it still works for about ten minutes, which is roughly the length it was built for. Worth knowing before you start: this is a pure guessing exercise dressed as a duel, and the pleasure is in watching someone else overshoot, not in mastering anything. The Commodore 64 version loads directly in the browser, so finding out whether those ten minutes appeal costs nothing at all.