PC/CD Gamer UK 49/PCGAMER49.bin/Games/Barrage/README.TXT

Text File | 1997-08-13 | 9KB | 186 lines

PLAYING THE DEMO

F1 IS HELP - CHECK OUT ALL THE OPTIONS

"PRESS BUTTON TO START" MEANS THE FIRING BUTTON FOR WHATEVER DEVICE YOU HAVE
SELECTED. THE DEFAULT DEVICE IS KEYBOARD. FIRING FOR KEYBOARD IS SPACE BAR
OR CTRL KEYS.

THE GOAL IS TO NEUTRALIZE ALL THE BOBBING RED BUOYS AND TAKE OUT AS MANY
ENEMIES AS POSSIBLE.

THIS VERSION IS 3DFX ONLY, OPENGL SUPPORT IS IN THE WORKS.

WE WOULD APPRECIATE COMMENTS, FEEDBACK AND ANY BUG REPORTS.
SEND E-MAIL TO [e-mail]

THIS SINGLE PLAYER VERSION HAS LIMITED WEAPONS, LIMITED PLAY TIME AND ONE
BUOY REMOVED. YOU CANNOT ACCESS THE PORTAL.

SUPPORT INDEPENDENT GAME DEVELOPMENT AND PAY TO PLAY THE UNLIMITED VERSION
OR PRE-PURCHASE THE GAME FROM OUR WEB SITE AND BECOME A BETA TESTER.
CHECK US OUT:  WWW.MANGOGRITS.COM.

NO, YOU CAN'T BLOW UP THE FISHERMAN (OUR ART DIRECTOR). BUT IF YOU ARE CLOSE
ENOUGH YOU CAN BLAST HIM OVERBOARD.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
Pentium 133 or faster (166 recommended)
3DFX card or Quantum3D card
sound card
32 MB of system RAM
Win 95 (NT with keyboard controls only)



GAME INFO
BARRAGE - A 3Dfx powered, real-time, high speed, flying, blastfest!
Launch yourself into an amazingly realistic 3D world. In your high speed
hover-fighter aircraft you can fly freely anywhere in our six outdoor,
underground and underwater 3D environments. Blast away at the military
targets, watch out for their return fire as you race to locate and neutralize
the heavily defended power buoys and activate the portal to the next world
before the clock runs down and your fuel runs out.

Plenty of fast, explosive arcade action never before seen on a PC! Our
real-time 3D flying and shooting game, "Barrage", is set in a series of fully
immersive, realistic 3D environments. While the graphics and sound are great,
the real excitement is in the action.

Great flight dynamics using simple flight and fire controls, spectacular
explosions and wild pyrotechnics, along with enemy AI and humorous bystander
reaction add to the thrill of competing head to head with another
hover-fighter-equipped pilot.

PRAIRIE DEMO
A train passes on a high trestle winding through tree dotted hills and
valleys that give way to an open green prairie. An action billboard plays
to the empty road leading into a small town with houses, barns and a church.
On a nearby lake, a lone fisherman in a small boat casts his line into the
water. The sun sets behind the hills. A lazy advertising blimp floats over
the valley to complete what would be an idyllic setting.
Except for the military presence...

Jet fighter aircraft explode across a sky already swarming with helicopters
on alert. On the ground, tanks patrol at random through the hills and across
the open prairie. Near the lake and in the town, missile launchers keep vigil
and parabolic dish installations send out damage inducing energy fields.
Flames bursting, shrapnel flying, everything is blastable!

Randomly floating around these clusters of lethal hardware are their auxiliary
power station buoys, protected by rotating density fields. These fields make
flying directly to the power buoys without getting shot very difficult.
Strategic attacks on the buoy defense targets are essential. The battle
ground is enclosed by a perimeter force field: no one gets in or out until
all the power buoys are deactivated to open the portal.


MANGO GRITS COMPANY BACKGROUND
We are a four person, self funded, real-time 3D garage style game developer,
using 3Dfx technology to develop high end 3D games for home PC and coin-op
LBE.

We met at Xatrix Entertainment where we made Cyberia and Cyberia2:Resurrection
using SGI Reality Engines, the coolest quarter-million-dollar toys ever. But
after two back-to-back pre-rendered, interactive cinema, rail shooter,
action/adventure, CD-ROM games, we were jonesing to get back into real-time.
But nobody wanted to put up the development money.

We wanted to and we could. We gave up big salaries, Brentwood apartments and
Land Cruisers. Moved to bad neighborhoods, drove Escorts and ate lots of
pasta. Because we are self funded with very low overhead, we got to decide
what product to make and which technology to use. We didn't have to conform
to the marketing department's idea of an acceptable established install base
or the fear that appears on an investor's face when you start explaining the
possibilities of a groundbreaking new technology.
And nobody bitched about how big and flashy the box needed to be.

Our specific goal was to take advantage of our SGI real-time experience by
using the new 3D graphics accelerators coming out for the PC. The mandate at
CGDC last year was to find the best 3D accelerator card. We chose 3Dfx. This
was easy. Probably the easiest of the thousands of critical decisions we made
this past year.

Getting our hands on a card was not so easy. Lost in a sea of big name
developers, we had to really push our way into the program. Thanks to Ross
Smith and Sue Barber, we received a card that June. We have been working our
butts off ever since. Our first demo was on display at SIGGRAPH last August
and our second demo was used by 3Dfx for their third venture round and by
Intel for the Pentium II launch.

This year at CGDC, we showed our game demo on a motion seat, four arcade
cabinets, a consumer card, a 6DOF input device, a 400Mhz super cooled
Pentium II and a three screen Vis-Sim system in eight different booths
(see Next-Generation Online "CGDC:Voodoo for You"). Our LBE game won an
Anubis Award at the 3Dfx Immersion '97 developer conference. At this year's
SIGGRAPH, we showed our Jesler Enterprises motion seat, Quantum3D accelerator
card, Pentium II powered LBE ride in the Quantum3D booth.

We have faith that by the time our company grows to a high overhead situation,
there will be other cards with comparable performance and an API to bridge to
them (can you say OpenGL?) or 3Dfx will rule the world. Which will be OK if we
get higher resolution, anti-aliasing and free beer.

For the time being, we are pursuing motion base coin-op LBE, bundling deals
with hardware manufacturers and direct Internet sales of our game.


MANGO GRITS TEAM BIOS
MICHEL ROYER - Technical Director
As a top technologist and game designer at the largest game company in Europe,
Infogrames, and a founder and technical director at Xatrix Entertainment,
Michel has created products (Drakkhen, Eternan, Chaos Control, Cyberia,
Cyberia2:Resurrection and many games on Atari, Amiga, FM-Towns, PC) that have
made quite a few dollars/francs for other people over the last ten years.

Michel received his Engineering Degree specializing in Robotics, Computer
Hardware Design, Software Engineering, Data Structures and Algorithms,
Compression Techniques, Micro-electronics, Product Development, Management
and English from National Institute of Applied Sciences of Toulouse, France
in 1986. In his spare time he practices for the Tour de France. His forte
(besides time compression) is surveying the technology landscape and the game
market and predicting where each will be in 18 months, then getting there
first.

SPENCER LEVY - Art Director
An accomplished artist and designer with a background in industrial and
transportation design, Spencer has created 3D computer graphics for
television at MetroLight, special effects for film at DreamQuest Images, game
production at Black Ops and Sony Imagesoft and for Xatrix Entertainment as
senior animator and segment director on Cyberia2:Resurrection.

Spencer studied Transportation Design with emphasis on computer design at Art
Center College of Design, Pasadena, California and received his BFA in
Industrial Design from Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. He is also a
speed demon - cars, motorcycles, turbo hopped hover fighters, the first to
fly, the last to die...

PIERRE SCHIRO - Lead Programmer
Programmer, assistant game designer and tool wizard with arcade action
chromosomes, Pierre started at Infogrames on Prisoner of Ice. For Xatrix
Entertainment he was lead programmer on Cyberia, did additional programming
for Cyberia2:Resurrection as well as tuning action sequences. At I-Motion he
designed game concepts and tools then was lead programmer and assistant game
designer on Torquen Studios' Smaug.

Pierre received his Diplome Universitaire de technologie d'informatique from
Institut Universitaire de Technologie, Villeurbanne, France in 1992. He is
also our best cook.

JOAN WOOD - President
An entrepreneur with the driving creative, technical and management force to
found three successful, innovative broadcast entertainment companies in ten
years, an independent video and sound engineer, technical director and
producer with hundreds of TV credits, Joan made the leap to game development
in 1991.

A founder at Xatrix Entertainment, she produced the hit CD-ROM game Cyberia
and produced and directed the monster sequel Cyberia2:Resurrection. All that
time fully immersed in the entertainment industry have given her a taste for
the fast life and a habit of sleeping under her desk.

www.mangogrits.com

BARRAGE GAME AND DEMO COPYRIGHT (C) 1997 MANGO GRITS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
MANGO GRITS, MANGO GRITS, INC. AND BARRAGE ARE TRADEMARKS OF MANGO GRITS, INC.