Ion Blast Main Screen

Ion Blast Guardian Screen

ION BLAST

FEAR has struck your being.
Suddenly you tremble at the slightest provocation.
IT has invaded the neural pathways of your brain.

To combat IT you must enter your own mind and travel its energy grid to search out and destroy the invaders. As they careen through your mind they are destroying it with Ion Plasma Blasts. Because of the nature of Ion Plasma, the blasts do not travel in straight lines, but skip about making them hard to predict. Under your control you have a highly coherent laser cannon that is directed by your thoughts. The cannon can be used to detonate the Ion Blasts before they impact on your shield. The computer that you linked into your brain was designed to direct and fire that cannon but soon after you delved into your mind a mouse chewed the connecting cable, thus negating computer direction for fire control. So you now have to manually control the laser. This is going to be tricky because the cannon was designed for the faster reflexes of the computer and so it is very quick to respond. This makes fine control of position difficult.

Protecting you is a force shield, powered by the IItron energy of your mind, but your IItron energy is limited and each Ion Blast hit drains some away. Firing the cannon also drains energy. Each Ion Blast that you detonate gives up its energy to you until you have enough energy to change levels of reality and face IT! An energy level of two hundred is required to break through (as indicated in the upper right hand corner of the screen.)

At this point you will be confronted by the fearsome eye of Negrulanth the Guardian. Negrulanth guards the final portal through which you must pass in order to conquer the FEAR and be free of it forever. Negrulanths eye tirelessly searches back and forth, scanning all that approaches the portal. The eye scans because it can only detect that which moves in its field of view. So in order to sneak past Negrulanth you have to match your motion to that of the eye so that you appear in a fixed position with respect to it. (This is accomplished by moving the joy stick in a direction opposite to the motion of the eye slot.) To aid you in this task you have a tracker display which shows you how far you slip to the right or left with respect to the eye. If the trackers indicator touches its boundary limits you will have moved too much and Negrulanth will devour you. If you make it through the ten levels of approach, the eye will shatter and you will have passed through the portal and conquered the FEAR! Good luck!

Ion Blast is written totally in machine code for the Commodore 64 so use the MLX machine language loader (listed periodically in COMPUTE!'s GAZETTE) to read in and store the program. At the start of MLX you will be asked for the beginning and ending addresses. They are:

After entering these addresses you can start typing in the code from the listing that goes with this article. Be sure to read the instructions for using MLX if you have never used it before. To run Ion Blast, use the commands:

A joy stick in port two is used to control the laser cannon and to position yourself before the eye.

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