********* Welcome to Project 64! The goal of Project 64 is to preserve Commodore 64 related documents in electronic text format that might otherwise cease to exist with the rapid advancement of computer technology and declining interest in 8- bit computers on the part of the general population. Extensive efforts were made to preserve the contents of the original document. However, certain portions, such as diagrams, program listings, and indexes may have been either altered or sacrificed due to the limitations of plain vanilla text. Diagrams may have been eliminated where ASCII-art was not feasible. Program listings may be missing display codes where substitutions were not possible. Tables of contents and indexes may have been changed from page number references to section number references. Please accept our apologies for these limitations, alterations, and possible omissions. Document names are limited to the 8.3 file convention of DOS. The first characters of the file name are an abbreviation of the original document name. The version number of the etext follows next. After that a letter may appear to indicate the particular source of the document. Finally, the document is given a .TXT extension. The author(s) of the original document and members of Project 64 make no representations about the accuracy or suitability of this material for any purpose. This etext is provided "as-is". Please refer to the warantee of the original document, if any, that may included in this etext. No other warantees, express or implied, are made to you as to the etext or any medium it may be on. Neither the author(s) nor the members of Project 64 will assume liability for damages either from the direct or indirect use of this etext or from the distribution of or modification to this etext. ********* The Project 64 etext of the Toy Bizarre help file. Original Windows(R) help file obtained from the Activision C64 15 Pack was supplied by Fandango. Converted by the Basic Bombardier. Some of the information in this etext is assumed to be close enough to the original hardcopy version until an orginal can be converted, which is likely to be called TOYBZ10B.TXT. TOYBZ10A.TXT, March 1996, etext #24 ********* Toy Bizarre Contents General Description [ 1.0 ] How To Play [ 2.0 ] Scoring [ 3.0 ] Hints [ 4.0 ] Game History [ 5.0 ] [ 1.0 ] General Description It's a living. Pop balloons. Catch toys. This much sounds easy. Did they tell you first to hurdle toys and make them glow? They mentioned these robot Hefty Hildas? "No?", you might ask. And turning off valves, they brought that up? Well, turn them off. You should know to take Coffee Breaks whenever they come around. Floating Faces, too. An extra life is a nice thing, not to be sneezed at. Maybe it's time you should be beginning? A Little Something Special For You! Toys! Your favorites! And you thought I forgot. Only this is real different. In this game, you catch the toys, or they catch you. You'll like the robot dolls, and you'll love the Safety Check. Coffee Breaks, too; they rev you up, just like the real thing! And there are valves and Piston Platforms and a skipping skeleton and....well. I don't want to give it all away! Anyway, saw this and thought of you. Heh! Heh! Heh! Guarantee This toy is guaranteed. Guaranteed to pull you in - and keep you. Guaranteed to have you moving at manic speeds. Guaranteed to put you through your paces. Once people played with toys. Now dawns the day when toys have their way, and play with people. You, for example. Guide Merton the Maintenance Man through a night at the Gizmoe Automated Toy Works. If you can. If you Dare! The toys are in revolt, and Merton's got trouble. Balloons fill up at valves. Turn the valves off - but watch out for Hefty Hilda. You don't really want to make her acquaintance. But you will. Pop the balloons or toys will escape - and make for Merton! (Relax - it's only a game...) If Merton meets Hilda or a toy, his skeleton skips off into the wings. As in angel's wings - get it? Of course, you can stun toys. Jump over them. That's right. A stunned toy glows, so you'll know. Touch it and it's yours. Oh, and about Piston Platforms. Should you or Hilda get caught on one, you'll go winging through the roof. As in goof. Give you a break you say? Gladly. Touch the cup on a Coffee Break and you'll be trottin' hot. Or reach the Floating Face and find a free life. Safety in numbers. But not necessarily in Safety Checks. Turn off all the valves before Hefty Hilda hits you or - well, it's not a pretty picture. We guarantee it. [ 2.0 ] How to Play Basics How to Start Press F1 to start. Live a Little. Begin with four lives. Acquire an additional life for each 10,000 points earned. Game ends when you run out of lives. Indicator. A row of balloons (top left) indicates how many balloons are remaining for you to deal with in this round. Valves. Balloons fill up at valves. If not popped, balloons release toys. Toys work their way to the bottom level where they hop into one of two IN bins, only to re-emerge as balloons at an open valve. Of the six VALVES that appear during the regular shift, all but the top two can be turned off. Hefty Hilda turns them back on, so be alert. If all four valves are off at the end of an "hour", you earn 4,000 extra points! All valves which appear during a SAFETY CHECK can be turned off. The faster you turn them all off, the bigger the bonus. Piston Platforms Piston Platforms are paired and appear along runways. Jump on an elevated one and its mate pops up. Toys caught on one as it pops up are stunned for a while. These can be touched without jumping over them. If Merton or Hefty Hilda are caught on a Platform, they disappear up off the screen. Merton loses a life if "popped", or gains 500 points for "boosting" Hilda. Joystick Use the joystick to move Merton to the left or right, even in mid-air. To jump, press the joystick button. [ 3.0 ] Scoring Close a valve: 40 points Jump over a toy: 10 points Pick up a stunned toy: 100 points Pop a balloon: 200 points Stun a toy on a piston: 30 points Time bonus: 50 points per minute remaining in the hour [ 4.0 ] Hints Mark Turmell, Designer and Programmer "Definitely keep an eye on the valves so you can pop the balloons before the toys come out. Try to stay towards the top of the levels, especially on later waves. The toys start moving so fast that it's much safer to be above them so they don't fall on you." "Listen, it's important to remember that you can control Merton while he's in the air. Also, the screen 'wraps around'; that is, move off the left side and you'll appear on the right. Careful not to run into toys or Hilda when you do! Enjoy yourselves!" [ 5.0 ] Game History Mark Turmell, Designer and Programmer "Toy Bizarre started as an animation of a man running across the screen. It was based on a really competitive two-player arcade game called 'Mario Brothers' that was in the arcades back in 1984. The first thing I did was write an editor that allowed me to build screens, floors, backgrounds, platforms, and so on. Mario Brothers had a few levels that repeated - Toy Bizarre ended up with about 30 different backgrounds or levels." The next thing to determine was a theme for the game. "I was into 'cutesy' games at the time, like 'Pengo' and 'QBert'. I had this list of funny names written down, and usually I'd come up with the name of the game first, then develop the game around that. 'Toy Bizarre' was one of the names I had, and the game grew from that. The idea was to develop a game where the action took place in a toy factory, so we added things like balloons, wind-up toys, dolls, and so on." "I was also into fast action games, where you get into really tight spots and have to blast your way out. One of my favorite games, even to this day, is Robotron 2084. The game designers at Williams Electronics still play Robotron daily. Our machine is set at level ten, and we've all gotten so good, we can still play for half an hour at a time, and get millions of points. It's really amazing - the action and pace of that game makes it really timeless. That's why control is so important in the games I design. Toy Bizarre had really good control, where you could move the character very precisely while he was jumping, and so on." "Up until around the time Toy Bizarre came out, Activision had been concentrating on Atari VCS and other cartridge-based systems like the Intellivision, Colecovision, and so on. Dan [Thompson] and I had been playing around with the Apple II and C64, so we were used to more of a PC environment. As an interesting side note, Toy Bizarre and Zone Ranger were the first disk-based games Activision ever released. Up until then, it had been all cartridge based. A few people from Activision recognized the potential of the disk-based home-computer- game market and spearheaded an effort to get the company moving in that direction." One of the negative side effects of putting a game as huge as Toy Bizarre on a cartridge was that it needed to be compressed. "It was originally released in cartridge form as well as disk, but it needed 3 different forms of compression to get it to fit on the cart. That's more compression than I've done on any game since then. Other programmers pulled it apart to see how we fit that much information on a single cartridge." With the program being so deeply compressed, the decompression took a fair amount of time, so "we put in the 'flashing colors' screen at the beginning, where the border flashes colors really quickly, during the 'load time' for the original cartridge. The disk version was just a straight dump of the program's object code, so the flashing intro screen ended up on the disk, but it really didn't need to, since there was room on the disk." The inspiration for Hefty Hilda "was a game called 'Berzerk', that had a 'smiley face' enemy that came around to clear you off the board at the end of a level. A lot of the games I designed had some sort of enemy who came around to clear you out, or keep you moving during the level. The 'Coffee Break' speed boost was cool, too. That is another game element I use over and over. It showed up as the 'Turbo' button on 'NBA JAM', and as the 'Fast Shoes' in 'Smash TV' - both were coin- op games I designed later for Williams Electronics." After Toy Bizarre, Mark wrote a game called Fast Tracks - The Computer Slot Car Construction Set for Activision. Shortly thereafter, he left Activision, and took a brief vacation from the game industry. He returned to games a couple years later, working for Hasbro Electronics with other Activision alumni David Pitfall, Little Computer People Crane and Rob Fullup, who worked on Zenji with Matt Hubbard. Hasbro ultimately closed down its video game department, so Mark moved to Williams Electronics in Chicago, where he is currently employed. His coin-op credits include Smash TV, NBA JAM, Total Carnage and the recently released WWF Wrestlemania. ********* End of the Project 64 etext of the Toy Bizarre help file. *********