| Winter, 2242. Eight months into the war. Tanks roam an abandoned army base. Sealed inside our vehicles, we're safe from the fallout but must rely on sophisticated synthetic vision systems to 'see' the world around us. The manufacturer calls it 'Tactical Reconnaissance and Engagement (X-Band)' but like all the other tankies fighting here today, I call it T-REX. | |
This war... I'm sure there were two sides, at first? Or was it three? Anyway, everything's a mess now. No-one's in charge. The only food, water and fuel is on-board other people's tanks. It's kill or be killed.
Under normal circumstances, synthviz shows a neat wire-frame view of the world outside - buildings and vehicles crisply outlined in 3D perspective. But these are not normal circumstances. Some kind of area-denial jamming system is messing with T-REX today, and the monitor isn't refreshing properly. Every new snapshot of the world outside overlays the previous one, leaving nothing but a mess of random pixels to look at. The techies were no help. They managed to come up with a cool name - eXclusionary Offensive Radiation (XOR) - but they can't do anything about it. The only good news is that the enemy's systems are affected in exactly the same way, so we're all equally blind.
But not completely blind. If something moves in T-REX's field of view, its shape appears in the noise, just for a moment. And if I drive the whole tank forward, everything becomes visible - until I hit the brakes. My ability to see anything is now based on movement alone. Should I sit still and wait for an enemy to make the first move? Or should I carefully - very carefully! - patrol the area, looking for targets? If I move, an enemy tank might spot me... With the right tactics and a good helping of luck, maybe I'll survive to see another dawn.
T-REX Battle Tank is a very basic multi-player online game based on my 'Weird POV Effect', as described in my YouTube videos from 2024:
To play the game, download the executable from the link below. It's for Windows 10/11 only, no installation necessary, just run the program 't-rex-game.exe' right from your Downloads folder. You must be online when playing the game. Windows may warn you that the file is not safe - this is just a general warning about running unknown programs from the internet, it doesn't mean the file is malicious. Override the warnings at your own risk. Most browsers will warn that you shouldn't run a downloaded .exe file; you will need to find the 'Keep file' or 'Download anyway' option, which might be hidden.
Download:
t-rex-game.exe (1,107Kb)
SHA-1 hash: 59974f65320dea0ed2c038be9075d94db891de44
Controls: Pick one of the 12 available arenas to join (each arena can have up to eight players). You'll appear at a randomly-selected spawn point in the arena. The bottom of your display will show your player ID and list up to three other players, based on who's closest to you. Use the arrow keys to drive your tank forward (up), backward (down) or to rotate left or right. Press the space bar to fire a shot - but be careful, other players might see your shells and pinpoint your location.
There are no NPCs in the game, any other tank you see is another human player. If there are no other players around, hit up a friend to join you! Tell them which arena you're in (see the lower right of the game screen to check).
This overhead view shows the layout of the arena:
Have fun!
Chris Long, April 2026.