Back in the day — in the paleolithic era of System 7 — there was a fun game on the Mac called DomeWars — basically a humorous take on the old artillery video games where you take turns lobbing shells at each other, adjusting your elevation and power until one of you gets whacked. We used to obsess on it quite a bit. It’s been updated for Mac OS X, which is cool.

A couple of years ago there was also Treads of Fury, which is simpler in approach to weaponry (there’s only one kind), yet richer in feel, as the terrain and animation has a certain artistic quality. It also eschews the usual controls for power, shooting, and elevation, combining the first two with a ‘hold the fire button down to increase power’ approach.

Fast-forward to 2005, and I try the freeware Scorched 3D, which is cross-platform and itself an update of the old-school DOS game Scorched Earth.

DomeWars is to Scorched 3D as, let’s see… Red Baron is to X-Plane.

Beautiful OpenGL-driven graphics, explosions, landscape destruction, cool sound effects, lots of customization. What more do you need? OK, there are semi-drawbacks: it takes having X11 up and running. But is that really such a price to pay? :) Also, the camera takes a little getting used to. Lastly, choose “Invert mouse y axis” under Options to make the mouse work correctly, but apparently only if you’re running it in windowed (versus fullscreen) mode.

Once you get that stuff worked out, however, make sure not to have any plans for the next couple of days.