Alloy Box

An enemy nation has acquired a valuable secret and has hidden it in the depths of a military compound. An expert in explosives shall sneak into said compound, blow the safe box made of special alloys and return alive and healthy... and you are this expert.

* How to play

The player takes the role of a soldier whose goal is to succesfully creep into the military compound, destroy the safe box with explosives to retake the secret and return to the surface alive. At the beginning, the player has no weapons but his own fists, and the doors that join the different parts of the compound are closed. Thus, first he'll have to locate a weaopn, then he'll need to find the magnetic cards that open the doors, and finally he'll look for dynamite to blast the safe box that keeps the secret inside. Meanwhile, the enemy soldiers (some armed with rifles, others carrying grenades) patrol the compound: if they spot the player they'll sound the alarm, open fire and summon more soldiers until they manage to kill the player, or if they cannot find him again, call the alarm off.

The items required to finish the adventure (submachine gun, three cards -green, yellow and red- and explosives) are located in green crates with a red question mark. Some of these crates also keep tin cans and ammunition magazines.Thetin cans can heal the player's wounds: whenever his "hit points" drop to zero, he'll consume one tin can in his inventory and his energy will refill. Similarly, the weapon he'll find at the beginning of his adventure needs ammunition, and it can be reloaded with the help of the corresponding magazines. The tin cans and the ammunition magazines can also be obtained by punching soldier enemies till knockout, as some of them carry said items and will drop them at random. The "hit points" and the player's inventory are shown in the panel to the right of the game area; you'll also find there the score and a symbol of the current state of alarm: blinking red if a soldier can see the player, multiple levels of red, orange and yellow as the time of the alarm runs out, and green if the alarm is already over.

* Controls

Joystick by default, can be redefined from the main menu. "P" starts a pause; pressing fire toggles the control style (classic or diagonal) and touching "P" again resumes the game. ESCAPE quits the current game and returns to the menu.

* Comments

The original plan was ambitious, as usual: a stealth game worthy of "Metal Gear" (1987 Konami) and its sequels. But once again I ran out of available memory, I ran out of time, I ran out of ideas... and the game had to become less organised, more chaotic, closer to "Cosa Nostra" (1986 Opera Soft) and other titles mixing the shootouts from "Commando" (1984 Capcom) with goals scattered around branching maps instead of purely linear stages. The workload was distributed very unevenly during the month of October, but at least I didn't have to rush it as much as one year ago in "Dire Dare". That's how this game afforded a longer testing stage that enabled the fine-tuning of the random events, the enemies' artificial intelligence and all those details that you never think of at the beginning.

* Legal crud

Code, graphics, music: César Nicolás-González / CNGSOFT

File compression: ZX7 by Einar Saukas

License: GPL3

Updates: http://cngsoft.no-ip.org/alloybox.htm