I know the earlier instructions were nicer, but not everybody could read them. So, here they are, in their beautiful black & white splendor.
I SUPPOSE THIS THING HAS SOME SILLY STORY TO EXPLAIN ITS TOSSED TOGETHER LAST-MINUTE CAST OF VIDEO MONSTERS?
Martians, who obviously have nothing better to do then make rotten movies and star in silly video games, have kidnapped your girlfriend. Okay, so it’s sexist, but I wrote it and, no, I don’t have an explanation why the Martians are dognapping girlfriends. They just do that, OK?
Anyway, you, Scruffy, must rescue your girlfriend by passing through the ten layers of the Martian capital city, aptly named Mars City (not only do they kidnap for no reason but they're not the most creative bunch of space aliens, either.) To rescue your girlfriend you must find and defeat the King Martin, who is hiding on level ten. And if you didn’t guess, the King Martin is the one with the crown.
“AND HOW DO I PLAY THIS @#!$&!! THING, ANYWAY?”
Each level of the city has five floors, some walls, and some trampolines. To get to different floors you can either jump down or bounce back up by walking or falling onto a trampoline. You can only exit a trampoline by moving Scruffy right or left, but only while bouncing up.
Infesting Mars City are Martians (what a surprise) and their hired help which includes a flying cat who enjoys stealing your bones and placing them around the maze, a parachuting race car and the grim reaper who has a habit of firing his skull at you. Which enemies you get depends upon what level you are on.
Also littered throughout Mars city are doggy bones and the teleporter. Picking up all the bones dissolves the current level and makes you fall down to the next level. Walking into the teleporter booth causes it and you to be teleported to another location around the maze. The teleporter booth moves around a set number of locations on each maze. Learning these locations will help you use it better (even though there will be no test.) You can also move the teleporter booth around without you by pressing [RETURN]. Also, on some level you will have to use the teleporter booth.
Floating around at the top of every level are some clouds (look, mom, I can see a cotton ball in that one!) Clouds are very dangerous and should be avoided at all costs. If you bounce too high upon the trampolines you have a chance of hitting a cloud and getting shocked (or maybe just bombing the game .... no, just kidding!)
After dissolving a level you’ll start to fall. Reaching the bottom and defeating the guardian will gain you admittance to the next level. During the fall you must avoid clouds and on higher levels you must avoid suicidal turtles who jump from the clouds in an attempt to get you. Originally I was going to equip the turtles with walkmans and say their were listening to “Suicide Solution,” (from the album “Blizzard of Ozz,”) but I used to listen to Ozzy when I was young and it seemed in poor taste (I'm trying to make up for being sexist with the “rescue your girlfriend” business.) And anyway, being a guitarist as well as a programmer I owe homage to Randy Rhoads. If you don’t know who he is, ask a local metalhead.
Before entering the next level, you meet the giant guardian of Mars. At the end of levels one through nine you can manage to scare him off but on level ten you must defeat him to free your girlfriend. (If it really bothers you can search-and-replace all “girlfriends” in this document with “boyfriends,” even though the end of the game will look extremely suspect of something certain ministers in the south would be afraid to have your children look at.) Also, falling stars will try to impede your progress and, on higher levels, a very annoying worm will appear. The worms can be, and should be, jumped.
“THAT’S GREAT, BOB, BUT WHAT CAN I DO ABOUT THEM PESKY MARTIANS?”
Glad you asked (who is Bob?!?) The cat, car, and reaper (including his skull) are indestructible and must be avoided. Both the cat and the car will hurt you, but the reaper's skull is the only part of him that will hurt you. The Martians, on the other hand, have only a slight hold on this plane of existence which is easily displaced by a well-placed bomb. You can lay up to ten bombs in a maze and every time a Martian runs into one he explodes and you get the bomb back (whatta-deal!) Of course, riding the way of non-violence in society (I wrote this in a cave), the aliens reappear after a while. During the fall you must just avoid everything except the occasional extra-point bone that comes along. On the guardian level you can once again place bombs. Put these down in front of the robot to change his direction. If enough bombs explode on the robot he will run away, gaining you admittance to the next level. Sometimes the robot will jump up and down and destroy your bombs, so be careful.
“OK, BUT WHAT’S THAT CORNY BLACK LINE AND WHERE THE HELL DOES IT TELL ME HOW MANY LIVES I HAVE LEFT?”
I tried to keep the readouts down to a minimum so it wouldn’t be distracting from the game (like giant robots aren’t). Anyway, the black bar at the top is your life line ... you only have one life. Every time you get hurt your life line goes down a little. When it’s gone it’s game over. If your life line disappears for a while, it means you can’t be harmed at that point. The score is to the left of the line. Originally, I didn’t have the score on the screen but some people talked me out of it. That’s the problem with kids today, nobody likes suspense.
Oh, yeah .... that’s right .... and here are the keys used to move Scruffy:
a left
s stop
d right
q drop bomb
space jump
return move teleporter
Also, the [TAB] key pauses the game and the 0 key on the keypad aborts the current game.
“BUT I DON’T FEEL IT’S A PROPER SET OF INSTRUCTIONS WITHOUT SILLY CHARTS.”
And boy, don’t I agree. So here it is:
Scoring
Bone 100
Alien 25
Robot 15
Completion of Maze 500
Completion of Fall 250
Completion of Robot 250
Bone Bonus 500
Killing Robot 5000
Scruffy likes a 1,000K (1 Meg) chunk of memory to run in. And ... it’s System 7.0 compatible! Yeah! Don’t expect balloon help. Really. Who actually uses that? Doesn’t balloon help strike you as another pet project, nested inside Apple, the company that can’t say “no” to pet projects?
“FINE. AS LONG AS I DON’T HAVE TO HEAR A LONG DISCUSSION OF THE GAME DEVELOPMENT FILLED WITH EGOTISTICAL AND LOFTY INSIGHTS THAT NO ONE REALLY CARES ABOUT.”
Of course not. And if you want to know how I did it, tough luck! As a matter of fact, I hate commenting. Commenting was invited by the same people who thought COBOL was revolutionary. And it’s written in assembly, and I love to make up esoteric labels, like DogJmSk2 (an actual label, stands for Dog Jump Skip 2 ...), so even if I did give you the code, you’d never understand it. Not only that, to squeeze speed out of it I had to do some real weird pieces of code designed purely for speed in such a way that I don’t understand them either. So it looks like were both up a creek, doesn’t it. And what can you do about it? Nothing! Ha ha ha!
“WHATS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN VERSION 1.5 & 1.6”
Nothing realistic. I had a lot of letters about it not running on color machines. It only runs in black & white, and in this version it won’t run otherwise. It will (by request) change the colors for you, and then change them back. I also removed the money dialog at the end, it seemed to shameless. I moved the window to the center for people with bigger screens, and I fixed a bug or two.
Also, if you drag the “volume” bar all the way to the left, it actually cuts the volume completely (not just turning it down to an annoying squeak.) Only people who are obviously cheating their employers out of hard-earned cash wanted this feature, but hey, if you’re gonna cheat somebody, might as well make it corporate America.
I added a “virus check” to Scruffy’s code. THIS IS NOT THE END-ALL of virus protection. It just does a simple little check to tell if the code of Scruffy has been altered. DON’T CALL ME if you have a virus!! I just put this in there so maybe it will catch a few of those little suckers and save some people some trouble. If you’re really worried about virus, please get a anti-viral program.
I actually started this program way back in 1988, and resurrected it and finished it in 1990, sending it out in 1991. I know a lot more about the mac now, and so I’ve tightened up some of the code. If you’ve had crashing problems before, maybe you won’t have them now.
“ANY LAST NOTES BEFORE I CLOSE THIS MEETING OF BOY SCOUT TROOP 238 AND WE ALL HIT THE STRIP BARS?”
Anyway, the code for this monstrosity would make the guys that preach macintosh standards explode if they saw it. So, if anybody corporate-like comes around, eat this document.
And, yes, here’s the cry for money. It’s a nice program, I spent a lot of time on it. $8.37 is all I ask for, and every dollar you send me helps my band out, and also helped me produce “Billy Goes Bowling” and, maybe someday, “Scruffy II!”
PLUG: Look for my new game, “Billy Goes Bowling,” out shareware, soon.
