The year is 2084. Resentful of Earth's economic dominance and the mother planet's refusal to permit an autonomous government, Mars Colony (a wholly owned subsidary of Terran Assets Corp -- a Microsoft company) has unilaterally declared independence. A nationalistic, war-mongering General of the Martian Defence Force (MDF) has siezed control with the help of unknown forces and her first act was to sever communications with the home world. Shortly thereafter, Terran military assets on Mars and in Martian space were attacked in a devastating surprise attack. All but Deimos have been lost.
Despite the magnitude of the loss and bewilderment as to how the MDF could have seized control of the planet so easily, Terran Command has ordered a stategic retaliatory action against key Martian facilities. (Note: this is an action, not a bloody, savage fight to the death with lots of civilian casualties -- that wouldn't look too good on CNN, would it!). You are to strike from Deimos using prototype Vac-Fighters. These advanced craft are the bleeding edge of Peace Enforcement and feature a wide array of weaponry, counter measures and all the other sexy things that people who buy guns desire. The Vac-Fighter is also equipped with the new Wave Motion Gun for attack on heavily defended targets (or lightly defended targets if you feel overzealous and there are no witnesses.)
ELINT reports indicate that the Olympus Mons Air Base is being used by the MDF as a staging area for a second attack on Deimos. Conduct a low level flight over the base and nullify any Martian military assets. (Technobabble translation: bomb the bastards back to the stone age.) All Martian ground and air units are to be considered hostile. Your Vac-Fighters are equpped with upgradeable rapid deployment in-flight weapons systems (i.e. bombs and other things that go bang.) Bombs are available for air-to-ground attack and the latest in matter cannon for aerial engagements. Reinforcements and weapon replenishment upgrades will be made available throughout your missions
If you succeed in this task, you'll have saved many lives, restored democracy to the Red Planet, and secured yourself a Senate ticket.
Mars Rising is a vertically scrolling arcade game for Power Macintosh computers, featuring 28 levels of joystick-thrashing action. Pilot your squadron of VacFighters™ in solo missions above the Red Planet, or team up with another pilot and compete against each other for fun, glory and fabulous prizes. Power up your VacFighters with inflight wepoons upgrade modules, and unleash some destruction on the war mongering Martian regime!
• PowerPC processor. We recommend at least a 80mHz 601, or a 100mHz 603 processor.
• 7500K free memory. We strongly recommend that you don't run Virtual Memory or RAM Doubler in low memory situations.
• 640x480 screen or larger, supporting 256 colours/grays or more.
• MacOS 7.5.5 or later.
• Sound Manager 3.1 or later.
• Due to the nature of the game, we highly recommend using joysticks or gamepads, especially in 2 player games. However, if you don't use such devices, you may still use the keyboard and/or the mouse.
On startup, the game will load and present you with a menu screen. You can use the menubar by moving the cursor to the top of the screen. To see a demo, wait for 10 seconds (without moving the cursor) or press the 'd' key. To stop a demo, press any key or the mouse button. To start a new game, click on the "1 Player" button.
To set the controls for each player, click on the 'Controls' button to display the InputSprocket configuration window.
Start a new game: click on either the 1 Player or 2 Player buttons, or press "1" or "2" respectively. Note: to reduce the time between games, you can also press "n" during the highscores screen to start a new game without going back to the main menu.
Your VacFighter is equipped with 2 main types of weapons:
Cannon: upgradeable air-to-air weaponry for use against all airborne enemies. Hold down the fire key to power up the Wave Motion Gun. When the Wave Motion Gun is fully charged, release the fire button to unleash a firestorm on your foes.
Bombs: these are "dumb" free falling bombs that rain destruction on enemy ground forces.
Mars Rising is a fairly demanding game, speed wise. Hopefully, the game will always run at 30 frames per second (FPS) on your machine. However, on slower machines it may slow down somewhat. If this happens regularly, try the following tactics in the following order:
• Quit any active applications before launching Mars Rising. In particular, ensure that you don't have any cpu-hungry applications or extensions running, such as network connections.
• Turn off Virtual Memory if you have it on (this includes products such as RAM Doubler) and restart,
• Restart with all non-essential Extensions turned off (except for Sound Manager 3.1 or greater).
In the Preferences window:
• Turn off "Real time shadows".
• Turn off "Translucency".
• Reduce the music quality. Mars Rising supports 3 types of music:
• CD "Redbook Audio". FASTEST (no CPU time is required), and uses no memory. Pop your favourite CD in the drive and bop out.
• MOD music (Amiga music module format and derivatives). Reasonably fast but quality varies enormously between MODs. Many MODs require a large amount of memory. If speed is a problem, then reduce the quality of the MOD music to 8bit 11khz Mono with no filtering, or play from your favourite CD instead.
• None. The option of last resort. Guaranteed to use no memory or CPU time! :-)
• N.B. If you have a fairly recent PowerMac (7200/7500 series onwards), then make sure you have Apple's "Graphics Acceleration" extension in your Extensions folder if this extension was shipped with your machine. This will allow the game to use any hardware acceleration available in your machine (and will probably speed up Mars Rising by about 30% on low-end machines).
If you have a screen which supports multiple resolutions, Mars Rising will give you the option of resizing your screen to 640x480 for the best gaming experience. If you don't want your screen resized, hold down the option key when you open Mars Rising. You can turn the resizing off permanently in the Preferences once Mars Rising is open. A file called "Display Library" is supplied with Mars Rising. This should be placed in your Extensions folder (inside the System folder).
To reset the high scores table to the factory defaults, hold down the Option key while clicking on the High Scores image at the options screen. Try clicking other things with the Option key too for fun and prizes!
• If Mars Rising fails to run properly or crashes on your machine, try restarting your machine with all extensions off. In particular, disable Virtual Memory and similar memory managment schemes such as RAM Doubler.
• If Mars Rising unexpectedly quits, ensure that you have no other applications running, and increase Mars Rising's memory allocation (through the application's Get Info window). Ensure that you have enough real RAM to play the game.
• Due to the limitations of keyboard hardware, the game may not handle properly at times, especially in 2 player games when using the keyboard for player control. If a joystick or gamepad is unavailable, or you prefer not to use one, then try to assign as many of your control keys to "modifier" keys such as Control, Option and Command. Using other keys may resulting in the game controls "sticking". You may also use the mouse, and any other input device which is supported by Apple's InputSprocket (included with Mars Rising).
