"Back in the Day" has an official year value?
If it did, I thought it was more like 1981, not '96. You know, hip hop. Hmmm...does "old school" have a different year value?
re: Scorched Earth....I believe
Gunbound is a close approximation of Scorched Earth destructive mayhem but with Worms-like manga-inspired characters, weapons, etc. It's all on-line (I think maybe massively so? I'm not sure) and thought I've never played it, I hear it's insanely popular with the kids these days.
If you're looking for some old-school flavour, you should go hang out at
House of the Underdog, an Abandonware/Freeware game site that has some *really* amazing, free, hobbist-produced game for download (when looking for a game though, check to see if it has an official site; HOTU has *serious* bandwidth problems, especially late at night, which is costing them a fortune).
If you're into old-school shumups (Space shoot 'em ups), then check out
ABA Games for Parasec47 (traditional shumup with randomly generated waves of fighters and bosses, different every time and a good challenge), Tumiki Fighters (armour your ship with the refuse of your destroyed foes), rRootage (random end-boss generating shumup) and A7Xpg (there's a game like this that's been made, but I don't know what it is). There are plenty of free shumups on HOTU as well, but a lot of them are in Japanese so you're on your own to figure out how to play.
If you liked Loadrunner (or it's C64 cousin, Jumpman), check out the Flash-coded (and Canadian produced!)
N, it will keep you entertained for hours with 100+ levels (and growing).
Happy gaming!