My childhood car crack, BEFORE internet and Playstation and oppo.

"Grindintosecond" (Grindintosecond) 10/08/2013 at 13:08 • Filed to: youth

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15

This was the cat's ass. During the 80's with Dio songs of dragons and fire and John Houston films, there were games that were better than anything Atari or Coleco Vision had. They were played on a table. Dungeons and Dragons? WTF?? Magical elf's or a Weaponized supercharged GTO? You bet your ass I'm packing up in the GTO. (I bet you thought I was going to say a supercharged weaponized Elf..) Enter the game "Car Wars" (more)

Premise? Design a car using their build rules, weaponized of course! and then go splatter your friends carefully built car during a Friday night sleepover arena battle or highway scenario all jacked up on Domino's pizza and new coke. It was awesome. The biggest attraction for myself and others was the modular building concept. Create a car to solve the problem. you couldn't have armor AND the biggest guns. It was all about eficicent effective compromise. What? Learning such things at 13?

There was some back story and it did evolve nicely. Supposedly there was a nuclear accident on the east coast, food shortages, rampages of nomadic tribes and the rest of civilization had to protect itself while traveling. Mad-Max in America but there was no civilization decay. Life was full of the 80's future of fast electric cars after the oil exhaustion. Sport became arena bloodsports of gunned-up cars (missiles and dropped weapons as well as ramming machines.) Society was still evolved with glitz and glamor and since it was the future, there were clones! so when you got killed you just activated your clone to continue life as if nothing happened. (it was the 80's after all...all endings happy!)

Reality: In your teenage life for this game you would spend insane amounts of time building your cars. Hours, days, weeks building all kinds of stuff so when you did have a chance to play the game against your friends you had something cool. There was endless combinations of cars, tires, engines, armor and endless weapons....endless glorious weapons on anything from a motorcycle to an 18-wheeler, later expansions had aircraft, boats, even some tanks but it was all a big world where you could put up any story and scenario and you built what you had to to run that story and win. The common limiting factor you would agree on would be a cost limit. Car couldn't cost more than $10k or 20k or 50k or an unlimited cost battle. that kept things more level. There were many expansions over the years:

Damn!..This was getting Goooodd!!! gas engines! Race car chassis for some sick arena action! Nitrous and boost! there were even quarterly magazines with stories, events, alternate rules, ideas, new arena designs, rules clarifications that were published. It was huge stuff and made for a big insane game. All the game play took was a table or floor, maps, counters, a few 6-sided dice. The game had all that in it including collision charts, handling tables, crash results, hit and miss effects, etc. to make. There was an old game called 'Autoduel' that combined the role playing ideals into the car-wars game and it is actually a very good and difficult game if you can stand the 2d top down 'beep-boop' sounds. It's out there somewhere.

End: I was getting near the end of High School, College would be around, hip-hop and some kind of soul music was rapidly becoming the rule with Boyz II Men, Paula Abdoul, Grunge was making it's way in and then gangster rap hit and the Playststion arrived once I hit college. Gone was the metal music about fantasy worlds and girls. Table games were OFF the table and the Playststion replicated everything you could ever want. Online games really hit big right before the 00's. Car Wars (and D&D *middle finger because there were no cars*) took the background stance like that scrawny freshman at prom waiting against the wall for something to happen. I still piddled around with the creation sheets now and again because of the whole problem/solution/limitations interest that's there in any modern video game where you create things. That was interesting.

Now: I got curious after finding my old box of games during a visit to my parents house. I searched online for the status of it now. There are still groups that play, mostly down in Texas and up in the northern colder states with big cities. There's some play by email going on but sometimes those fizzle out in the middle of a match. At the big annual gaming conventions, there is still a devoted group that plays the game and uses that time to really do it right. !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!!

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SJ games recently did a high quality expensive new version of their past popular OGRE game and !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . When people funded it they shouted in the comments to bring back Car Wars...evidently there's even MORE people who want that game than Ogre. So they are working on a 6th edition eventually to be found on kick starter...so there are enough people willing to play a good modern version on the table. There's dad's playing it with their sons....showing them what they played in the day.

But the problem with games then vs. now? The time to play. CW took hours to play (in game tim ewas rarely more than 30 seconds before someone or all was destroyed) but nobody has that kind of time now unless they're single or without kids.

My favorite moments of the game revolve around trying to stuff as much engine and nitrous into a car as i could and hitting the button to ram someone into oblivion, and missing...and hitting the other side of the arena as escape velocity...it seemed to happen alot.

505Turbeaux > Grindintosecond 10/08/2013 at 13:12

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yup we both grew up in the same period then. This was mine, though your game was much more interesting by the sounds of it. Rock on (with Dio)

Grindintosecond > 505Turbeaux 10/08/2013 at 13:15

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Now that looks like a really fun game. Mine took a long time to play and was sold in stores run by that guy from the Simpson's comic book shoppe.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > Grindintosecond 10/08/2013 at 13:15

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As a D&D/Pathfinder/Shadowrun/WoD/etc. etc. player I've been wanting to get into Car Wars for a while. I didn't know a new version was in the works. You think if I hid away a PbP Car Wars game here on Oppo people would play it?

505Turbeaux > Grindintosecond 10/08/2013 at 13:16

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but you had fire shooting out of your car onto your competitor! Or so it would seem

Grindintosecond > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 10/08/2013 at 13:18

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Possibly. I have no idea how many here are familiar with it. io9 or Kotaku guys might know of it more but a PBEM or even a PbP game takes alot of time and deadlines and people are counting on you and all that. Plus, the post would get long and crazy with people seeing the posts. email works nice. I can only imagine what it would take because i sure don't have the time. Go check out the SJ games forum and the CW section there. you can find any recent attempts to play it.

Oh, and Shadowrun is back, on steam. its a diablo styled game now. theyre working on it in chapters. Seattele now and theyre working on Berlin. It's pretty cool.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > Grindintosecond 10/08/2013 at 13:27

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I've seen the Shadowrun game, but haven't played it yet. I'm still on the 20th anniversary (rev. 4th ed.) pen and paper system - they have a 5th out but it's not meaningfully different enough for me to "upgrade".

I've run PbP games of Star Wars Saga Edition, and participated in PbP D&D 4E and others. I like "mythweavers"'s interface for running PbPs best, but you can really run a game on any forum software you like.

Grindintosecond > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 10/08/2013 at 13:29

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well, if enough people are interested, i'm sure they'd like to try it. especially over on the SJ forum. im sure here too...again if guys want to. i hope they see this convo and put in their interest.

Grindintosecond > 505Turbeaux 10/08/2013 at 13:32

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yes i did have fire out of my car....and flaming oil or dropped spikes or machine guns or missile launchers or even ram plates and laaazorrrssss... I had a shag Van with a few anti-tank cannons out the front once.....and got shredded through the side cause it couldn't handle and turn well.

505Turbeaux > Grindintosecond 10/08/2013 at 13:37

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sounds about par for the course. Moar Lasers woulda helped

Grindintosecond > 505Turbeaux 10/08/2013 at 13:42

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Yeah. Lazors cause fire too sometimes. fire is really bad in this game. Jumps are the best!....if I could ever get to one before getting destroyed.

505Turbeaux > Grindintosecond 10/08/2013 at 13:43

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now I am really intrigued...

Grindintosecond > 505Turbeaux 10/08/2013 at 13:47

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Last game i played was a PBEM game out of nostalga. started with a round arena (the lavadome!) with a lava pit in the middle and 4 ramps to jump it and land across safely with. you got points for killing people and points for jumping the lava. I rushed toward the ramps and then cut right to circle the ramps and drop explosive spikes in front of them so others would have problems. i got rammed in the side before i got to the second ramp and i was about run through and killed. my spikes took out that cars tires and he rolled over, also destoryed. The game fizzled out and never got finished at about that time. there were 6 players starting. it's fun if it runs smoothly.

505Turbeaux > Grindintosecond 10/08/2013 at 13:48

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need online version of this. Gears are spinning in my head now :)

MikeMeade > Grindintosecond 10/08/2013 at 14:11

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I played Car Wars as a kid. My boy scout troop would do it at summer camp after the evening camp stuff was over. One night would be spent on making the cars, and the next night we would play the game. I don't recall ever finishing the game, but the game and the box are burned into my memory as a fifth or sixth grader.

Grindintosecond > MikeMeade 10/08/2013 at 15:56

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Yeah we make the cars, then draw the car to show what it looks like. Then unleash the car. I almost went into auto design because of this game.