PC/CD Gamer UK 4/PCGAMER04.bin/shware/lammas/lammas.txt

Text File | 1994-11-19 | 19KB | 438 lines

Welcome to the latest Llamasoft shareware release: Revenge of
the Mutant Camels for the PC.  I hope you enjoy it as much as
Llamatron.It's a different kind of game but I hope you'll like
it just as much.
Once again, the PC conversion was done by the very
excellent Jonathan Howell, who has once again done a wicked
job of porting my 68K code to the PC.  Rather him than me... I
hate segmented address spaces <g>

The game runs on any PC with a 286 or higher CPU with a VGA
display.  The game supports the Soundblaster sound card and
may be played with the keyboard or joystick.

Next some information about the release.  We're trying some
fine tuning of the Shareware procedure, and I'd like to tell
you how it works this time, and exactly why.

The unregistered version of the game contains ten levels  -
the registered version contains all 42 levels and has a 386
and higher enhanced mode which is faster on those machines, plus
support for Roland and Adlib soundcards.

REVENGE!

ABOUT THE GAME:

Revenge isn't quite as flat-out manic as Llamatron. You may or
may not be relieved to hear that.  Revenge has the same gameplay
modes as Llamatron: Solo, Droid (called CPU ASSIST in Revenge)
and Two-Player.

The gameplay is as follows:  You are a rather threadbare-looking
camel.  If you are playing CPU Assist or Two-Player, you are
accompanied by a large shaggy goatcreature called an Ancipital,
which stalked C64 screens long before Psygnosis ever did Shadow
of the Beast.  You are the Good Guys.  Your mission is simple:
stay alive through 42 zones of 7km each.  These zones are populated
by rampant telephone kiosks, skiing kangaroos, butch Greenham
Common Peace Women, manic Minters, flying sheep and all the
usual nonsense.  These are the Bad Guys.  They try to kill you
off and you, naturally and in keeping with the traditionally
calm, rational and thoughtful nature of videogames, get to waste
them with lots of spectacularly destructive weaponry.

SPECIFIC DETAILS:

[PC-specific note... all references to the joystick and pressing
FIRE may also be interpreted as pressing the arrow keys and SPACE
for the purposes of playing off the keyboard].

To install Revenge, type INSTALL in the directory where you
have unzipped or copied the game files.  You can install from
a floppy to a HD that way.

When you want to play, cd to the directory containing the game files,
and to run Revenge, type REVENGE at the DOS prompt and press return.
The game will load and display the title screen appropriate to the
version, along with some information about registering to prod
the consciences of anyone who keeps playing the game and hasn't
paid yet.  Pressing FIRE gets past this screen and you'll find
the game in auto-demo.

You might like to eyeball the demo a while; it will demonstrate
the first few levels, but to see the rest you have to play!
You can interrupt the demo at any time by pressing the fire
button.

Pressing FIRE to interrupt the demo brings up a menu screen.
Menu screens are all the same in operation, there are always
three options.  You select which option you want with the stick
and bop the FIRE button on your selection.

The first three options are:

VIEW HISCORE TABLE (view highscore table, of course)
PLAY REVENGE (leads you to Game Start)
RESUME ATTRACT MODE (resumes the demo)

The default is Play Revenge.  Pressing this yields the Game Start
menu:

RESTART: Allows you to start the game at a Restart Point
PLAY: Start game
QUIT: Not play after all

Selecting Restart brings up a text-entry screen where you must
enter a valid Restart Code (more on these later).  Selecting
PLAY brings up a final menu from which you select Solo, CPU Assisi
or Team play to begin the game.

We recommend that you play your first few games with CPU Assist
controlling the goat.  As you get more skilful, I recommend Solo.

CONTROLS:

Your camel is controlled with a joystick thusly: Left and Right
do pretty much what you'd expect, Up causes the camel to leap into
the air and Down causes the beast to lie down on the ground. {Keyboard
users - use the arrow keys, and spacebar as the firebutton}.

Being a camel, the animal spits continuously, and being a Mutant Camel,
what it spits is a variety of lethal bullets.  The camel fires in
the direction the joystick is pointing.  If you hold down the
FIRE button, the camel will not jump or sit down, enabling you to
aim shots directly overhead whilst remaining on the ground.

If you are playing with the CPU Assist goat, you can use it in
conjunction with your camel. Normally the goat runs around aiming
and firing at enemies independantly.  If you get alongside the
goat (or ahead of it; it will run to you) and sit down, the goat
will mount your hump.  Once there you can carry it around and it
acts as a 'smart' gun turret, aiming at enemy targets, and as a
shield, protecting your hump from being hit.  The goat will stay
on your hump until you die or until you sit down again, which causes
the creature to leap off.  (It is possible for the camel to pick up
Player Two on the team game, but Player Two can leap off).

At the beginning of each wave there is a period of time during which the
goat will come to your side, enabling you to get the beast securely
mounted before the level begins.

Each level takes place over a set distance. That distance is
denoted onscreen by a Start Post, six 'Kilometre Posts' and
an End Post which scroll by on the ground.  The attack begins only
once the camel passes the Start Post, and ceases immediately
it passes the End Post.  Between levels you receive a Shield
Bonus for remaining shield left, and an Energy Boost which
increases your shield strength, but never by as much as you'd like.
The Shield Energy indicator is the camel's face on the right-hand
side of the status bar.  As your shields get damaged a big red 'X'
gets drawn through the face.  When the 'X' is complete it's
MacMutant Camelburgers all round at Cairo Macdonald's.

Every five levels, you get to a Restart Oasis, where you get to
see a silly animation of the camel getting refuelled, and you
are given a Restart Code.  Make a note of the Code, as you can use
it to restart a game from that point whenever you play Revenge.
Use the 'From a Restart Point' option on the game start menu.

[UPDATE: One criticism we've had from ST users is that in the font
used D's and O's look too similar, and that the restart code disappears
from the screen too quickly.  Yakly advice: keep a biro by the
machine, remember that if you don;t press FIRE during the oasis
scene you've got about fifteen seconds, and D's are bevelled at
the top whereas O's are square]

Now, on to the goodies: Powerups and Weapons.  As you play the
game, you'll notice that some of the enemies, when shot in a
particular way, will yield clouds of tiny bonuses which float
up the screen.  This is an excellent thing, because you score
the bonuses AND you get an increased chance of getting a powerup.
Powerup icons are square and drift down from the top of the
screen.  You claim a powerup by touching it with your beast.

The powerups are as follows:

'P' - Power-up current weapon by one level.  (Weapons have four
levels each of powerup - current level shown next to shield
gauge - power runs down with time).

APPLE: Add small amount to shield (12 apples=full shield)

WEAPONS: Four powerups, each with a small blue icon inside
representing the weapon type.  When power runs out, weapon
reverts to the default small blue bullets.

NIKE TRAINER: Doubles the scroll speed and therefore halves
the time taken to reach the end of a level.  Useful on tricky
levels.

CAMEL: Gives an extra life.

SMART BOMB: Kills or damages everything on screen.

HALO: Makes you invincible for about 20 seconds.

CUP OF TEA: Like a smart bomb, only more so.

'W': Warp directly to next restart point.


The goat can also collect all these powerups; so you can both have
different weapons going at the same time, which can be most
useful!


That's the good news.  The bad news is this: every time you or the
goat get hit, there is a chance of an Anti-Powerup being released.
They look like your usual powerups (coz they're handled by the
same routine) BUT they always have some RED in the border of
the icons.  Do not collect these icons. They do you bad.

POWER DOWN (looks like a backwards 'P'): Power down current
weapon by one level.

CIGARETTE: Makes your animal have a ciggie. Control becomes slow,
erratic and jerky until the ciggie is smoked.

CONFUZER: (two arrows <- -> with a warning triangle underneath)
Nasty one this. In solo and CPU assist, it causes the left/right
joystick commands to become inverted for about ten seconds. In
two player mode, the players find themselves controlling each
other's beasts!  Confuzed beasties have a green question mark
over their heads until it wears off.

SKULL: No mistaking this icon; it's red and baleful.  Instant
dead camel unless you've got a halo.  CPU-Goat can eat this with
impunity, but Player 2 in Team Mode is mortal.



KEYBOARD CONTROLS: During a level you can press 'x' to quit back
to the menu at any time; 'p' pauses the game and 'o' resumes play.

Should you complete all 42 levels, you will get to the Red-Hot
Zone where it all happens again but harder.  If you get through
THAT you get to the White-Hot Zone, and Ghodhelpyou if you get
there!



Okay, I've told you what everything does in the game. Now some
hints on how to play.


HOW NOT TO GET THE HUMP PLAYING REVENGE OF THE MUTANT CAMELS:

1: MILK THE BONUSES.  You can play Revenge just to survive
but you won't get a huge amount of points or powerups that
way.  The game is set up to reward the skilful player with
riches and bonuses once that player knows what to shoot and
when.  For example, on level 1 you can just shoot the birds
once and they fall down dead.  But if you keep shooting them
as they fall, they yield lots of bonuses.  So you get your
beastie on your hump, go directly underneath and fire straight
up at them, keeping firing as they fall down onto you, and you'll
get loads of points and loads of powerups.

2: LOOK FOR SWEET SPOTS.  Some levels have a particular place
a prudent camel can stand and not get hit (much).  Maybe you
have to send the goatie on ahead of you. Maybe it's better on
your hump. Study each wave and formulate a strategy.

3: HAVE A CIGGIE!  Because of the way ciggies slow down your
camel, if you get one just as you start to jump you will stay
in the air a lot longer than you usually would.  This can be a
Good Thing if there's a lot of nasty stuff at ground level.

4: ADVANTAGES OF DIFFERENT WEAPONS.

ROUND BLUE BULLETS (default): Good all-round weapon; can be
aimed in any direction.

LASER: Can only be aimed left and right, but inflict more
damage than RBBs, especially when powered-up.  Excellent for
some enemies, but a bitch to be stuck with when you really
need to be able to fire up.

COMB BULLETS: Can be aimed in any direction except straight
up or straight down.  Feeble in their lowest-power state, but
with successive powerups they expand into lovely screen-filling
swathes.

OVAL SINEWAVE BULLETS: Can be aimed any direction except straight
left and right.  Very slow on low power, these bullets are still
devastating because they are not stopped by the enemies.  They do
a huge amount of damage and release a lot of powerups.  Get them
powered-up for best ease of use, and despite their strength they're
not appropriate to every situation.

5: CHOOSE YOUR GRAVESITE.  If you know you're gonna die and you're
on a heinous wave, make sure you die as close to the right-hand
side of the screen as possible.  Your new camel won't be released
into the fray until your tombstone has exited on the left, and
by the time it does appear you'll be that much closer to the end
of the wave.

6: SNIPPETS.  You can herd kiosks but eventually you have to jump
them. Exploding sheep are best viewed from high above. Coke cans
and Atari logos are absolutely lethal.  10p bits do more damage
than falling receivers. Chips only disgorge bitstreams if you
hassle them.  Beware the pink laserbase in Space Invaders. When
the vicar invites you to tea, herd the mugs vertically.




REVENGE: HISTORICAL NOTES.

The original Revenge was written in autumn 1983 on the C-64, just
before I had my first ever skiing holiday. It was part of a
sequence of games comprising Attack of the Mutant Camels (implemented
on the C64 and 8-bit Atari), Revenge (C-64) and Return of the
Mutant Camels (C-64).  This latter game was Yak's last C64 game,
and some of you may have been unfortunate enough to encounter
Mastertronic's Amiga and ST versions of that last game released as
Revenge II.  Those versions were a travesty of the original
Commodore game. Mastertronic used five programmers and took as
many months to produce an absolute dog of a conversion. They'd
changed a lot of the levels and relentlessly eradicated every
ounce of playability Yak built into the Commodore original. If
you ever see the Mastertronic version anywhere, don't buy it
because it is dreadful.  They never even showed me a copy before
they released it - I had to buy it from a shop in Basingstoke -
and it's awful.  There is only one true 16-bit Revenge, and this
is it.

The names of the 42 levels, and the overall themes, are the same
as those in the original Commodore game.  Those of you who played
the old game will be better prepared to handle the enemies as they
behave in a manner similar to their Commodore counterparts (sometimes).
Of course the original game had no goat, no powerups, no restart
points, no team mode and only one bullet on the screen at once, so
don't expect it to be exactly the same as you remember!




WHAT'S HAPPENIN'...

- Well, currently we've been a bit quiet on the shareware scene,
basically because a certain Sunnyvale corporation insists on this
Yak being chained to a multi-processor 64-bit-bus-architecture
pipelined parallel RISC-based pixel-eatin' shitkickin' monster
called Jaguar, which I must say suits me fine.  Me first Jag game
has just been released; it's called Tempest 2000, and if you were a
fan of Tempest first time around, rush out and buy a Jag and a copy
of T2K this instant.  If you were too young, or missed Tempest in
the arcades, then basically you need to rush out and buy a Jag and
a copy of T2K this instant, to see what you've been missing.  If you
didn't even like Tempest in the arcades, then what you should do is
rush out and buy a Jag and a copy of T2K this instant, to check out
all the improvements.  If you are breathing and your heart is beating,
that basically means you're alive, so it's obvious that to enjoy
that state, you need to rush out and buy a Jaguar and a copy of T2K.
It's so obvious, really.

Seriously, though, the Jag is an amazing bit of kit.  You can do
most excellent things in your games, like draw Gouraud-shaded polygons
faster than a speeding 486, use the hardware to melt truecolour screens
like oil-paint, or shatter a bitmap into a zillion pixels, or do
ridiculous 3D starfields and particle systems.  Those RISC chips
burn rubber, and no mistake.  There are some kicking games coming
out for it too - DOOM for starters, but done in truecolour, with none
of the 'banding' that you see in the lighting model on the PC, and
running at 25FPS; Alien versus Predator, another 3D texturemapped
environment game where you can choose to be the Alien, the Predator
or a Space Marine; the graphics in this are breathtaking,
especially when you're confronted by the Alien legging it at top wak
down the corridor towards you...  Best of all, there's going to be
a 64-bit version of... (cue choirs of heavenly angels, only they're
not angels, they're herds of angelic llamas which are somehow floating
fluffily in the clouds)... STAR RAIDERS!  Drooloverdrive! Codelust!
YAK WANT ONE!!!

BTW, I haven't sold my soul to Atari, I'm not an employee, I'm still
a freelance coder, but they're giving me some nice work at the moment.
I'm plain impressed by the Jag.  It's easy to learn, cheap to buy,
and ridiculously powerful.  Given that S*ga are arsing around with
the Mars and the Saturn, and Nin-Nin won't be releasing P:Unreality
until late '95,  I reckon the Jag stands a decent chance of becoming
a well-established game console.  It's cool.

Not that I'm biased or anything, oh no, not me <g>

Anyway, T2K is out and I'm currently nearing the end of the next
Jag project, which is a new light synthesiser.  This is going to be
built in to the Jag CD-ROM addon, and will generate a very
psychedelic display for you whenever you play an audio CD.  The
display is partly driven by an FFT analysis of the music, but you
can also play it yourself like Trip-A-Tron, or any combination of
the two.  Unlike in TaT we're not limited to just pixels anymore,
and you'll see a lot more screen-filling effects using polygons
and digital video feedback.  If you've been into any of our lightsynths
on other computers before, then basically, what you need to do, is
rush out and buy a Jaguar and a copy of T2K this instant, then wait for
a while (playing T2K throughout), then go score the CD-ROM unit and prepare
to go through your entire audio CD collection....

I've been *so* busy with the Jag I haven't even had time for the
customary skiing holiday this winter.  Bummer.

Flossie is looking prettier than ever; it'll soon be time for the
summer trim, which is a shame, because she's *so* cuddly with all
that fur.

Yak is now online and may be reached by email to:

[e-mail]

Favourite game at the moment: definitely DOOM.  I'm halfway thru the
second episode in UltraViolence mode.  Lovely, especially on my
spiff new DX2/66.  Great fun, although it goes against the grain
to take a chainsaw to anything with horns (although at least they're
pink and hairless.  If they had thick shaggy fur and didn't keep
trying to kill you, they'd be quite attractive).

Anyway, gotta go, get this all zipped up and uploaded...

See'ya next time...

-- Y a K  17/4/94


ps You can't sit down right next to the left edge of the screen.
If you try it you'll make the camel twitch in a convulsive manner which
had at least one game tester helpless with laughter.



























baaaaaaa!  said Flossie