Multiplayer on One Keyboard 1: Triplane Turmoil

By: Jordan Magnuson

On: February 12th, 2008

Short intro: I am Flaming Pear, and I’m back. Obviously this site is Derek’s now, and I’m grateful that he’s let me return to share my two cents. I love indie gaming, and I love what Derek (and all of you) have done with this site.

Now, on to the gaming. I thought I’d start out by posting on a category of games that is under appreciated, under covered (no pun intended), and these days under produced. You know the games I’m talking about: those beautiful creations that let you sit down with your brother/mother/friend/enemy/albino pig and battle it out on one keyboard. Elbows in gut. Teeth on skin. Nails in scalp. Blood on floor. Fists pounding away.

I love these games, and I’m going to share a few of my favorites. These games aren’t new, but some of them are classics that are perhaps unknown to recent converts to indie gaming, and others of them are little gems that went largely unnoticed at their time of release.

First: Triplane Turmoil

This one is definitely a classic. Based on the (even) older classic Sopwith, Triplane Turmoil is a sidescrolling WWI dogfight simulator developed by Dodekaedron Software in 1996. The single player game lets you fly missions as England, Germany, Japan and, um, Finland, but the brilliant multiplayer mode allows up to four (that’s right, four) people to battle it out on a multi-leveled playing field that is entirely visible on one screen. The goal is simple: destroy the other players’ bases while protecting your own.

The controls take a while to master, but once you get into the swing of things (could take a good couple of hours) you will find that, like the gameplay in general, they are brilliant. There are few multiplayer gaming experiences of any kind that surpass some of the battles I’ve had with experienced TT players. The agony of outfitting your plane at the beginning of each run (do I go for speed, maneuverability, more ammo, bombs?), the challenge of keeping your plane in the air even when nobody’s shooting at you (true to WWI-era aircraft), and the sheer joy of successfully pulling off a double somersault, triple twist, back-peddling maneuver to drop a bomb on one of your opponents planes and watch it explode in midair (potentially destroying you in the process), are moments I will no doubt be yelling about in the nursing home when I get there.

Download Triplane Turmoil from the DOS Games Archive (Free, 1.94 MB).

You’ll probably want to run the game using DOSBox (a wonderful emulator, if you don’t already have it).