I loved playing Liero when I was a kid. One of the best patterns of play I had found and one of the few shooters where I was even remotely competitive with others. Super cool to see that it's still alive and that there is even a web version.
No, Liero is a real-time game somewhat inspired by Worms perhaps, but mostly by Molez. This has several versions, some of which are (reversed engineered) open source versions of the original game.
Interesting! It looks like Worms 1 came out in 95, then MoleZ a few years later, then Liero. It definitely seems like the same genre of game... the ninja rope definitely brings back some nostalgia :)
I mean, yes, but Liero means "worm" in Finnish, according to the wiki.
Just trying to understand how these games evolved from each other (or not) for the sake of video game history :) I loved Worms when I was a kid, and wish I had discovered Liero back then!
Yeah, I know (am Finn, and played Liero a lot when it was first released). And sure, it’s not exactly wrong to describe Liero as "Worms but in realtime".
However, Liero was inspired primarily by another Finnish SW game Molez, the titles sharing two defining gameplay elements: realtime and digging. Like moles, worms live underground and dig tunnels, so they were a natural animal choice for a Molez clone.
The ninja rope in Liero, of course, is straight from Worms though.
Loved playing Worms as a kid, not so much Liero. But before Worms, it was really Scorched Earth[0] that got me introduced to the genre. And with which I must have spent untold hours.
all the neighborhood kids used to crowd into my neighbor jeff's dad's office for scorched earth. a half dozen preteens around a 486 having a blast... gorilla.bas was a nice stand in for when we were at school
Star Control II lives on as "The Ur-Quan Masters":
"The project started in August 2002, when Toys For Bob released the partially ported sources of Star Control 2 3DO version to the fan community. Our goal is to port this wonderful game to current personal computers and operating systems. It is and will remain 100% free of charge, and anyone can contribute to the project and thus help make it even better. For more information, look at our info page."
We had seriously limited options at my boarding school until we figured out how to root the machines and get quake and GTA running with serial cables… gorilla.bas all the way.
The best part of GORILLAS.BAS was how easy it was to explore, and crucially, mod. Some of my first programming experiences were tweaking it to change how the throws work, damage, etc. Super basic stuff but a wonderful gateway into the world of development.
It’s a shame there’s nothing as dead simple as that these days. Minecraft I guess is closest? But imo not comparable due to the closed nature and complexity.
There was a flash game called Tanks that looks a lot like Scorched Earth, AI was bugged in that it would purchase better weapons but never actually use them, tons of fun to play against others though.
Fantastic game. One of my favorite multiplayer experiences, besides San Andreas, classic UT/Q3 and some Tron based lightcycle game that was basically fast 3d multiplayer snake.
Yes, that's the one! Excellent, another mystery piece of my gaming history recovered, thank you.
Others recovered in the last decade are an FMV game who's demo blew my mind back in the day (almost certainly "Deadly Tide"), a two player split screen tank battle game where you could rescue little humans besides fighting with eachother ("Fire Power") and that awesome bike trick game "Elasto Mania".
There was also Wurmz!, a networked multiplayer version of Liero. Some history and binaries of various version as well as the source code can be found on this website [1].
We played LieroX a lot at school as we could add a bunch of fun mods to it and it was networked. I think at the time, LieroX had just came out too, so it was fresh compared to Liero.
Liero is part of the Finnish shareware game scene that lasted from early 90s to mid 00s [1]. These games are super nostalgic for me and a lot of other tech minded Finns of my age!
Not just Finland, Liero was big in Estonia, too! I remember I got Liero on a floppy disk from a friend early 00's and ran it on my Win98. Good ol' days. Terep2 was another great game.
Brazil too. Used to play this with family and friends, especially one of my cousins. Also played it quite a few times with friends in computer classes. Everyone could play using the same keyboard at the same time, it was crazy.
Happy to see my own game “Oikeutta Eläimille” in this list.
I made it in turbo pascal in about 1 week, uploaded it to a BBS and it started to spread. Then pretty soon I saw it mentioned on TV and that totally blew my 16 year old mind.
I can make something and the world will react to what I make? Cool!
This is what got me interested in this gig in the first place. I am still yet to create something the world will react to, but whatever, I am enjoying the journey anyways
My favorites in the Finnish scene were the cave shooters (luolalentely). Games such as Auts or V-Wing. Are there any modern games available in this genre?
Very cool to see such a list maintained. The PaybackTime 2 is still playable, albeit without sampled sounds (crashes the emulator), here: http://rflxn.com/paybacktime2/
> It takes the best from games like Liero, Worms, Quake and Counter-Strike and gives you fast action gameplay with tons of blood and flesh. Little ragdoll soldiers fight against each other on 2D battle arenas using a deadly military arsenal.
Jump'n'Bump was awesome. I played it so often back then that I made a GUI launcher for it, since you could change various settings through command line flags only.
Brainchild Design[0], the studio that made it, had some other fun and highly polished games too, Quadnet was one of my favorites.
Oh wow, a familiar name from the OpenLieroX days! Do you still do any Liero related work? OLX was like peak Liero for me, at least for the multiplayer community, clan wars and all that. Lots of good times back in the 2010s.
Unfortunately, I don't really find the time anymore. It was really fun working on it, but it took an incredibly amount of time, and now my focus shifted to many other things (deep learning, family).
I probably should release some updated binaries at some point though, such that it works properly on more recent OS.
butcher is published by the creators of soldat, but is developped by Phobia Game Studio (maker of Carrion) and, as for soldat, they've been quite opened about their inspiration from Liero (enough for drawing liero midi art on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXu65Bx0dFo )
(so different team than soldat, but common inspirations :))
In what sense is this the "original" Worms game? Is there a particular tie between them? There's been a lot of ballistic artillery games going back to the very dawn of computers.
I assume our hero dang has some automation in place but sometimes I dream about him rembering all posts and carefully linking the beloved topics with past occurrences.
One of the best PC hot seats classics. Endangered my high school graduation :) I wanted to recover some of the custom maps we created and played but sadly they are in the silicon heaven already.
It's fun how everyone's youth is the best time ever, but I bet i find many fellow connoisseurs here: Liero, windows 2000, electronic music of the early noughts, the internet before Facebook, Matrix, Futurama, Lebowski.
A Gen X can show up saying Nirvana and BBS was the real deal before it all got whack or someone younger can make a point with more recent cultural phenomena.
I used to play Liero with my cousin for hours. It just barely would not fit a 1.44MB floppy. We downloaded it so many times over 14.4k dialup, go out to grab dinner with the family, come back to a dropped connection.
I imagine that's the stories I will tell my grandkids but it probably won't be that interesting. Hopefully we can see it well... maybe the rave stories will fare better. I store my old DnD stuff for the odd chance it will have vintage value to the generations far away.
Same. Another amazing one I played in those days was zatacka / achtung die kurwe. So funny how we were able to pack 5 people on one laptop keyboard back in those days.
And it was so hard! You had to have the perfect coordination moving and digging while aiming, shooting, roping, dodging and switching weapons and checking everyone's health. Sometimes all at the same time!
I feel so lucky to have played it on a slow amd 20+ years ago, because banana bombs and big nukes slowed the game down and gave you the perfect bullet time matrix fight experience.
So many good memories from high school! Gaming in the computer lab was banned in theory and the teacher always tried to delete any games found on these machines. So we always kept about a dozen 'hidden' copies on each machine.
I've played Noita (https://noitagame.com/) for quite a bit, and lately it clicked to me, that the core mechanics of the player and environment come from Liero. Though Noita is a single player rouge-lite, it has wands instead of guns, but environment is destructible, and explosions work the same.
It's much deeper, both in mechanics and in lore, it has actual levels with progressions, but I was curious why did I enjoy that game so much. Turns out, I spent a ton of time playing its predecessors with my friends :)
1. Download Love from https://love2d.org/
2. Launch love.app
3. git clone git@github.com:whyboris/Gravity-Wars.git
4. cd Gravity-Wars.git
5. zip -9 -r GravityWars.love .
6. open GravityWars.love
The copy of Libro we got our hands on was configured to have cooldown time on all weapons reduced to barely anything. It was incredible, ridiculous fast mayhem.
My highest claim to fame is to be in the original Liero readme credits. I sent in the idea for a capture the flag mode as a kid. Me and my friends spent some hundreds of hours playing it. I remember you could tweak the reload speed of the weapons somehow to make it pure madness
My favorite settings were 10% health 100% reload time, you had to be very careful especially with some of the more self destructive weapons but IMO was the best competitively. It made things like dart, fan, winchester (?) usable (if just barely).
You can also play multiplayer in the browser at webliero.com
There is an active community, simple to pick up and play, no login. Although most of the active servers use some more fast paced mods with different weapons, but you can start your own server in the browser with the classic mod.
This seems about as close as we might get to another fun one, https://cratebeforeattack.com/ for more traditional worms style gameplay. It's fun but crashes randomly, and hasn't seen much since 2020. It anyone knows more details about if the game is looking for a new maintainer please reach out! There is so much potential here.
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[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadhttps://www.teeworlds.com
The real-time is a cool twist though.
https://www.hedgewars.org/
https://github.com/hedgewars/hw
On Ubuntu, you can install it with
Just trying to understand how these games evolved from each other (or not) for the sake of video game history :) I loved Worms when I was a kid, and wish I had discovered Liero back then!
However, Liero was inspired primarily by another Finnish SW game Molez, the titles sharing two defining gameplay elements: realtime and digging. Like moles, worms live underground and dig tunnels, so they were a natural animal choice for a Molez clone.
The ninja rope in Liero, of course, is straight from Worms though.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_Earth_(video_game)
"The project started in August 2002, when Toys For Bob released the partially ported sources of Star Control 2 3DO version to the fan community. Our goal is to port this wonderful game to current personal computers and operating systems. It is and will remain 100% free of charge, and anyone can contribute to the project and thus help make it even better. For more information, look at our info page."
https://sc2.sourceforge.net/downloads.php
Works on most modern operating systems and even has community add-ons and remixes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game)
It’s a shame there’s nothing as dead simple as that these days. Minecraft I guess is closest? But imo not comparable due to the closed nature and complexity.
Others recovered in the last decade are an FMV game who's demo blew my mind back in the day (almost certainly "Deadly Tide"), a two player split screen tank battle game where you could rescue little humans besides fighting with eachother ("Fire Power") and that awesome bike trick game "Elasto Mania".
[1] https://mental-reverb.com/wurmz.php
We played LieroX a lot at school as we could add a bunch of fun mods to it and it was networked. I think at the time, LieroX had just came out too, so it was fresh compared to Liero.
[0] https://sourceforge.net/projects/gusanos/
[1] https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luettelo_suomalaisista_sharewa...
My younger brothers played it a lot.
I made it in turbo pascal in about 1 week, uploaded it to a BBS and it started to spread. Then pretty soon I saw it mentioned on TV and that totally blew my 16 year old mind.
I can make something and the world will react to what I make? Cool!
https://www.soldat.pl/en/
> It takes the best from games like Liero, Worms, Quake and Counter-Strike and gives you fast action gameplay with tons of blood and flesh. Little ragdoll soldiers fight against each other on 2D battle arenas using a deadly military arsenal.
I used to host a popular soldat server in the day; good times.
Shame it never regained popularity with the steam release.
Jump'n'Bump, anyone?
Brainchild Design[0], the studio that made it, had some other fun and highly polished games too, Quadnet was one of my favorites.
[0] https://www.dosgamesarchive.com/profile/brainchild-design
Unfortunately, I don't really find the time anymore. It was really fun working on it, but it took an incredibly amount of time, and now my focus shifted to many other things (deep learning, family).
I probably should release some updated binaries at some point though, such that it works properly on more recent OS.
It was a nice game.
Liero can be played in browser now, for those who remember - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22980676 - April 2020 (86 comments)
Show HN: A browser-based multiplayer clone of the DOS game Liero using WebRTC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20668273 - Aug 2019 (7 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25964774
It's fun how everyone's youth is the best time ever, but I bet i find many fellow connoisseurs here: Liero, windows 2000, electronic music of the early noughts, the internet before Facebook, Matrix, Futurama, Lebowski.
A Gen X can show up saying Nirvana and BBS was the real deal before it all got whack or someone younger can make a point with more recent cultural phenomena.
I am defined by the era of Liero.
Silicon heaven - where all the calculators go!
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/638490/Soldat/
I feel so lucky to have played it on a slow amd 20+ years ago, because banana bombs and big nukes slowed the game down and gave you the perfect bullet time matrix fight experience.
It's much deeper, both in mechanics and in lore, it has actual levels with progressions, but I was curious why did I enjoy that game so much. Turns out, I spent a ton of time playing its predecessors with my friends :)
https://github.com/whyboris/Gravity-Wars
The Love docs imply that the contents of your repo need to be be zipped up and then... something else happens? https://love2d.org/wiki/Game_Distribution
If you could make an idiots guide to running the game, I'd appreciate it, I've been wanting an orbit-based game like this for a long time
My favorite settings were 10% health 100% reload time, you had to be very careful especially with some of the more self destructive weapons but IMO was the best competitively. It made things like dart, fan, winchester (?) usable (if just barely).
There is an active community, simple to pick up and play, no login. Although most of the active servers use some more fast paced mods with different weapons, but you can start your own server in the browser with the classic mod.
Thetr was a fully 3D version at some point. It was novel and fun, but didn't really work.
What fantastic times. Thanks for this post!