PRECURSOR TO ANARCHY
====================

	(by Thomas Harte '98)



INTRODUCTION / PLOT / RULES
===========================

	It is the first of January in the 'space year' 2000. On waking up from
their new years parties, everyone is shocked to find that all those old films
were right and that their houses were miraculously all swapped for chrome
corridors during the night. Even more surprising is that a media mogul has
suddenly come to control the entire worlds television and is now entirely
in charge of what we do and don't watch. Unconfirmed rumours suggest that his
name may rhyme with "Dandelion and Burdock", but I couldn't possibly comment.
Therefore he decides to put whatever he feels like on television, and devises
a brand new sport - designed specifically to appeal to no-one just so he can
laugh at their expense. He's a crazy guy!

	To summarise - in this sport, two of the least likely to exist vehicles
ever produced are placed into a boxed in arena with some equally unlikely to
exist floating pods and forced to attempt to eat each other. 

	Not to summarise - to keep up with the chrome corridors, a bald,
knighted inventor (once responsible for a rather well known home computer which
doubled as a rubber drinks coaster) decides to invent a new car even more useful
than his last one! A hover car! He spends a week thinking about it and knocks
something up in his garage. It works, but has the strange side-effect of not
only repelling the ground, but everything else around it. Unable to get close
enough to fix the problem, and inspired by another rich computer guy from 
Seattle - he lists it as a 'feature' in the manual - and starts to mass produce
the car, with a very useless rocket feature on board. The rocket fires fine,
and has a very very rough sort of auto-aim feature, but has the disadvantage of
being more affected by the direction the car is heading than the way it is
facing. And because the inventor has only given the vehicle a back firing
motor, the direction the car is heading and the direction it is facing rarely
co-incide. He produces two before the media guy comes and buys him out. In order
to invent a new sport.

	The media guy produces two of the cars and 20 small, roughly diamond
shaped, pods which float but have no propolsion of their own and have an
interesting remotely controllable switch feature. By hiring professionals, the
media guy finds he is able to remove the need to push everything else away from
the pods, but not the cars. He then invents a new sport thus :

	Two cars and twenty pods are placed into a boxed area of really quite
flat land. Now, with each pod a car collects, they will grow in size. With each
shot they fire they will slightly decrease in size, but hitting the opponent
with a shot will greatly increase them in size. A big enough relative size will
allow them to literally swallow the opponent. However, size is not necessarily
a blessing since a greater size will also greater encourage the pods to be
pushed aside by ones presence. Collecting a pod causes another pod with a
greater propensity to be displaced, and rotated slightly to the side, to come
in to existance elsewhere on the play field.

	Though this sounded interesting, the media guy decided that the special
switch on his pods should also come in to play. Whenever the pods are switched
(by radio signal), they stop being a nice green/blue colour, and become a
vicious red colour. The red pods then have roughly the opposite properties of
their nicer cousins and act to suck the players in, and massively decrease their
size, throwing them aside, should a collision occur. Also, 5 pods each will
actively chase either player, attempting to pull themselves into the space
noramlly occupied by a single pod in order to really give the player a bang!

	The media mogul sets the radio switch to switch either way every 60
seconds, forces the players into the skies and demands the game begin. Boy is
he a hands on guy!


CONTROLS
========

	All controls are configurable from the options menu.


SOUNDS
======

	Unfortunately during an argument with the media guy, both players were
hit with a stick with the strange outcome of making them both entirely deaf.
Therefore, although the game comes with a multitude of interesting and exciting
sounds - you'll never hear them!


GRAPHICS
========

	An interesting combination of various types of surface, you can select
the resolution at which to view the graphics from the good ol' options menu.
Also, in game, 

	F1	acts to switch wall texturing off,
	F2	acts to switch it on again, and
	F3/F4	act to make it look all silly (sub-affine and affine)


COMMENTS
========

	I'm only a poor student and didn't really have time to 'finish' this
game, though just for reference, all the 3d code was written by me (including
polygon drawing, etc.), but blitting and input devices are all handled by the
Allegro library, which is at the very least something to do with Shaw
Hargreaves - chech http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/allegro for more information.

	If the game is bugged, or fails to work then I accept no liability for
anything whatsoever relating to whatever you may be thinking of - and anything
you may ever think of at this time. As long as the .exe, 'data.dat', 'font.dat'
and 'config' are present, there should be no problem, comprende?

	As for why it is called 'Precursor to Anarchy' - make your own mind up,
idiots (all will be revealed later). Hope you like it!

		-T.Harte@bigfoot.com