You are the last survivor of an expedition sent to Mars to destroy the last batch of Martian Killer Robots (MKR). Being a hero, instead of trying to run away, you decide to stay to defend the base till help is sent to you You are equipped with 2 types of craft; the defence craft (DC) and the repair craft (RC). The DC can move left and right and Are, but it cannot move over holes caused by the MKR's lasers. The RC can move over such holes, and fill them be pressing the appropriate key. You also control a laser-gun, situated at the left hand side of the screen. This should be used only in emergency, since it uses a lot of energy. The available energy is displayed at the bottom right corner of the screen.
As the game begins, you will be shown the four types of MKR, and the points gained when you kill them. You gain no points if the robots crash on the floor of the base, but you gain extra points if you kill them by the DC instead of killing them with the laser-gun. Your score is shown at the bottom left corner of the screen.
After some time, an option to define the playing keys and the skill and speed level is given. Then the high score table is displayed A demonstration of the game follows. Pressing a key between these options will start the game. Hints and tips
You have a limited supply of energy, and this decreases when you or the MKR fire. You also have 3 lives for each type of craft, and if any of thse are used up, you will ... die! After killing 25 robots on each level, help is sent, and the lives and energy are replenished. The programme There are 4 short machine code subroutines which are called from basic. These are read from strings, and I suggest that these routines should first be typed in and checked. The first subroutine is used to get the ASCII code of the character at the current cursor position. The second subroutine returns the key code (see manual App. Ill p. 16) when a key is pressed. The third routine is a small programme using M/C interrupts, to set pen 15 into a set of 25 alternating colours. The last is an allphone-speech convertor for use with the DK Troniks speech synth. COMPUTER GAMER #19 |
