This is Asteroids, a GEM version of the popular arcade game.
(C) 1999 by Mario Becroft.

License: this program is freeware and, as such, may be distributed freely 
provided that the original archive is distributed complete and in 
unmodified form. This program may not, however, be distributed as part of 
or together with any product that is being sold on a commercial basis 
without the permission of the author.


ABOUT THE GAME

The game of Asteroids takes place in a asteroid field in out space. The 
player must manoeuvre a spaceship which can rotate and thrust forwards. 
There is no friction or gravity in out space and so controlling the ship is 
quite interesting, since it continues moving until thrusted in a different 
direction. (In fact there is adjustable "inertia" which if set to a value 
less than 1, will cause the ship to gradually loose speed of its own 
accord. Inertia values greater than 1 do not make sense but can cause 
interesting results!)

As stated above the game would rapidly becoming boring, but this is not so 
owing to the perilous asteroids. In case the spaceship crashes into an 
Asteroid it is destroyed, and only a limited number of spaceships are 
available. So avoiding the asteroids takes on some importance.

To make things easier the spaceship is equipped with missiles that can be 
launched at the asteroids. Unfortunately destroying the asteroids is not so 
easy: an asteroid hit with a missile breaks into two (or a user defined 
number of) smaller asteroids, each of which in turn breaks into two very 
small rocks. Only then may the rocks be finally destroyed. Of course points 
are added to the player's score for each asteroid destroyed, and the 
smallest asteroids gain the highest score.

To make matters worse, after spending some time in the asteroid field, 
dangerous flying saucers start to roam across the screen. It is imperitive 
to avoid the saucers' missiles which are capable of instantly destroying a 
spaceship. However shooting a flying saucer results in a bonus score. The 
smaller saucers are harder to hit but are worth more points.

When one asteroid field is cleared another appears but with even more 
asteroids up to a certain limit. Fortunately every time 20,000 points is 
reached the player is given an extra spaceship to replace one that was 
lost. And in the worst case when asteroids are closing in from all sides, 
the player may invoke the hyper-jump mode which causes the spaceship to 
temporarily dematerialise and reappear elsewhere on the screen. But beware -
there is no guarantee as to where the spaceship will reappear, and that may 
happen to be directly in the path of an oncoming asteroid!


CONTROLS

Three control methods are available.

The arrow keys may be used to manoeuvre the ship and spacebar to fire 
missiles. The problem with this is that depending on the keyboard repeat 
rate the controls may be unresponsive, and the game will not respond to 
more than 1 key pressed at the same time.

Therefore the recommended control method is via the shift keys or the mouse.

The left and right shift keys will rotate the spaceship counter-clockwise 
and clockwise respectively, while control thrusts the ship and alternate 
fires missiles.

Many people prefer mouse control, however, where moving the mouse 
horizontally rotates the spaceship, the left mouse button fires missiles 
and the right mouse button thrusts the spaceship forwards.

Any combination of control methods may be used at the same time, and apart 
from the arrow keys which are always available, the various control methods 
may be enabled or disabled by the user.

All game options are configured via the Settings option in the File menu. 
If BubbleGEM is installed, help is available on each option by clicking the 
right mouse button. To restore sane values for all options the Defaults 
button may be used.

All settings are automatically stored in the a file called ast.inf in the 
user's home directory upon exiting Asteroids, and restored when the program 
is loaded again.


CONTACTING THE AUTHOR

Mario Becroft, the author of Asteroids may be contacted at the following 
addresses:

Email: mb@gem.win.co.nz
WWW: http://gem.win.co.nz/
Telephone: +64 9 412 9700
Post:
P.O. Box 332
Kumeu
Auckland 1250
NEW ZEALAND


FINAL WORDS

I would be very pleased to hear from you if you have any comments, good or 
bad, about the game. You can contact me at the addresses above. I am 
looking forward to hearing from you!

--- These are the instructions for the game. Apart from that you are on 
your own. Good luck - you will need it!
