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- This is Asteroids, a GEM version of the popular arcade game.
- (C) 1999 by Mario Becroft.
-
- License: this program is freeware and, as such, may be distributed freely
- provided that the original archive is distributed complete and in
- unmodified form. This program may not, however, be distributed as part of
- or together with any product that is being sold on a commercial basis
- without the permission of the author.
-
-
- ABOUT THE GAME
-
- The game of Asteroids takes place in a asteroid field in out space. The
- player must manoeuvre a spaceship which can rotate and thrust forwards.
- There is no friction or gravity in out space and so controlling the ship is
- quite interesting, since it continues moving until thrusted in a different
- direction. (In fact there is adjustable "inertia" which if set to a value
- less than 1, will cause the ship to gradually loose speed of its own
- accord. Inertia values greater than 1 do not make sense but can cause
- interesting results!)
-
- As stated above the game would rapidly becoming boring, but this is not so
- owing to the perilous asteroids. In case the spaceship crashes into an
- Asteroid it is destroyed, and only a limited number of spaceships are
- available. So avoiding the asteroids takes on some importance.
-
- To make things easier the spaceship is equipped with missiles that can be
- launched at the asteroids. Unfortunately destroying the asteroids is not so
- easy: an asteroid hit with a missile breaks into two (or a user defined
- number of) smaller asteroids, each of which in turn breaks into two very
- small rocks. Only then may the rocks be finally destroyed. Of course points
- are added to the player's score for each asteroid destroyed, and the
- smallest asteroids gain the highest score.
-
- To make matters worse, after spending some time in the asteroid field,
- dangerous flying saucers start to roam across the screen. It is imperitive
- to avoid the saucers' missiles which are capable of instantly destroying a
- spaceship. However shooting a flying saucer results in a bonus score. The
- smaller saucers are harder to hit but are worth more points.
-
- When one asteroid field is cleared another appears but with even more
- asteroids up to a certain limit. Fortunately every time 20,000 points is
- reached the player is given an extra spaceship to replace one that was
- lost. And in the worst case when asteroids are closing in from all sides,
- the player may invoke the hyper-jump mode which causes the spaceship to
- temporarily dematerialise and reappear elsewhere on the screen. But beware -
- there is no guarantee as to where the spaceship will reappear, and that may
- happen to be directly in the path of an oncoming asteroid!
-
-
- CONTROLS
-
- Three control methods are available.
-
- The arrow keys may be used to manoeuvre the ship and spacebar to fire
- missiles. The problem with this is that depending on the keyboard repeat
- rate the controls may be unresponsive, and the game will not respond to
- more than 1 key pressed at the same time.
-
- Therefore the recommended control method is via the shift keys or the mouse.
-
- The left and right shift keys will rotate the spaceship counter-clockwise
- and clockwise respectively, while control thrusts the ship and alternate
- fires missiles.
-
- Many people prefer mouse control, however, where moving the mouse
- horizontally rotates the spaceship, the left mouse button fires missiles
- and the right mouse button thrusts the spaceship forwards.
-
- Any combination of control methods may be used at the same time, and apart
- from the arrow keys which are always available, the various control methods
- may be enabled or disabled by the user.
-
- All game options are configured via the Settings option in the File menu.
- If BubbleGEM is installed, help is available on each option by clicking the
- right mouse button. To restore sane values for all options the Defaults
- button may be used.
-
- All settings are automatically stored in the a file called ast.inf in the
- user's home directory upon exiting Asteroids, and restored when the program
- is loaded again.
-
-
- CONTACTING THE AUTHOR
-
- Mario Becroft, the author of Asteroids may be contacted at the following
- addresses:
-
- Email: mb@gem.win.co.nz
- WWW: http://gem.win.co.nz/
- Telephone: +64 9 412 9700
- Post:
- P.O. Box 332
- Kumeu
- Auckland 1250
- NEW ZEALAND
-
-
- FINAL WORDS
-
- I would be very pleased to hear from you if you have any comments, good or
- bad, about the game. You can contact me at the addresses above. I am
- looking forward to hearing from you!
-
- --- These are the instructions for the game. Apart from that you are on
- your own. Good luck - you will need it!
-