This game reminds me of an old game called "Castle Wars" written in BASIC for the old Tektronix 4014 DVST graphics terminal (circa 1979). The main differences are this version has much better graphics. Otherwise the old version was more challenging. Besides the velocity and angle, the old game threw in a wind velocity and direction. The game was a two player game where each play tried to blow up the other's castle. It took three hits to completely demolish a castle. At the start of the game each player entered his name and the game would put out annoying messages to each player during the game.
I was working for a small company in Vancouver, WA at the time. We had two really strange guys that worked in the new product testing area (Ron and Dave). They were always on each other's case about something. The rest of us referred to their area as the R&D Department. Ron and Dave played each other in Castle Wars every day during lunch. Dave could never beat Ron.
One day after work I got to looking at that Castle Wars program and decided to make a slight modification to the game. I changed the code so that whenever some entered a player name of "Ron" the program would add a random value of + or - five to fifteen percent to the entered velocity on every turn after the player had scored one or two hits on his opponent.
Ron and Dave played the game for another two months (until the company filed bankruptcy) and Ron never could figure out why he was no longer able to beat Dave. Meantime Dave made sure everyone knew how much he had improved and would constantly let Ron know about it.
About two years later I did some contract work for a company that Ron and a couple of other former co-workers founded. They had obtained a lot of the equipment from the old company, including that Tek 4014 terminal. I talked Ron into playing Castle Wars a few times and of course he could never win. The day I finished my contract (after I had my check in hand), I grabbed Ron and showed him the code change. He actually took it pretty well, except when I mentioned that his two co-owners had known about it from the beginning. Now that did piss him off. We never had the heart to tell Dave.
