STYZOR'S
CONTEST

Only Fast Mouse Action
Saves You From Certain Death

BY GREG KOWIS

Fight for your life in STYZOR.ARC on this month's START disk.

Life or death. It's up to you. Keep your eye on the target and your finger on the trigger button. Quick shooting will keep you alive, to once again compete in Styzor's Contest.

You nave been capturea by Styzor, the evil emperor of Lycon. His greatest pleasure is watching panic-stricken prisoners (like you) compete in Styzor's Contest. His rules are simple: if you score in the top 10, you live; if you don't, you die. The game, once a popular pastime, is now dreaded throughout the empire. Occasionally Styzor prolongs the torture of good players. If you score high enough he may give you a second chance, just to watch your fear and frustration grow.

The Contest
To play Styzor's Contest, copy STYZOR.ARC and ARCX.TTP onto a blank, formatted disk and unARC STYZOR.ARC by following the Disk Instructions elsewhere in this issue. You should get two files. GFABASRO.PRG is the read-only GFA BASIC 2.0 interpreter; STYZOR.BAS is the GFA BASIC 2.0 code for Styzor's Contest, which runs in high or low resolution.

To start the game double-click on GFABASRO.PRG, then pick STYZOR.BAS from the item selector. The title screen appears, then is replaced by the battle screen showing five moving targets and your mouse-controlled blaster. Move the mouse until the crosshairs are centered on a bouncing target then left-click the mouse to fire. You end a wave by destroying all five targets before time, shown in the lower right-hand corner, runs out. Once a wave is finished, it is replaced by another wave, with smaller targets. When you clear all five waves you move to the next level, with faster targets and less time to eliminate them.

If you're worried that you won't complete a wave - which means certain death - you can use the rapid fire control, a right click instead of a left. Your weapon will fire continuously until you release the right mouse button.

But be careful! Rapid firing will cost you points. Your score is shown on the left side at the top of the screen; your level is on the right side. In the center is the high score, the one earned by the best of the 10 best.

The Top 10
Press the space bar any time to pause the game; press it a second time to resume play. You can quit early by pressing [Control], [Shift] and [Alt] simultaneously. If you place in the top 10, you'll see the celebration display, where you can put your name on the winners' list. The top 10 scores are stored in a file named STYZOR.DAT, which will be created if it doesn't already exist.

Greg Kowis lives in Arkansas. This is his first program for START.