ZBLAST(1)

NAME
zblast - blast the bad guys on VGA displays

SYNOPSIS
zblast

DESCRIPTION
Zblast is a shoot-'em-up.

GAMEPLAY
The idea is this: Shoot everything. The whole lot. No messing. Your ship is at the bottom of the screen (the funny-looking green thing). You can move left, right, up and down within the lower half of the screen. You can shoot (two shots at a time). You can also shoot a kind-of wave of shots (described hereon in as a PDC, or Power DisCharge - tacky eh?) to help satisfy your genocidal tendancies. The PDCs are in limited supply, the standard shots are not. When the bad guys explode, the green bits that fly in different directions aren't harmful. Neither are the 'stars' (uh, dots) in the background. Just about everything else is. When your ship is blue however, it cannot be harmed. This happens whenever you have just lost energy, i.e. when you've just been hit. You start with 20 energy points. If you lose no energy in a wave you get 10 extra energy points; if you lose less than ten energy points in a wave you get an extra PDC. There are additional bonuses for finishing levels (a level is a group of five waves). If you run out of energy points the game is over.

Your score is shown at the top left of the screen. Your energy left and PDCs left are shown in the top right.

KEYS
Cursor keys move up/down/left/right. Space fires. Enter fires a PDC. S toggles sound on/off. P pauses. Esc quits the game.

BUGS
The game frequently slows down, and the sound starts breaking up, rather badly in parts. There are currently 26 waves (which equates to just over five levels). This is far too few and it's way too easy to finish. There's no high-score table. Nothing special happens when you finish. A few events (like firing a PDC) are silent. The sounds aren't up to much. (You can use different ones if you want - they're 8-bit mono 8kHz unsigned samples.) These things will be fixed whenever I get the time.

AUTHOR
Russell Marks (mr216@gre.ac.uk)