Piston is a combination arcade-thinking game, it takes fast reflexes as well as planning and calculation.
The Story;
You and your friends live in vast underground cities, connected to each other by tunnels.
For years your lives have been uncomplicated, and you prospered and advanced. But now, a peril threatens your whole society. Those living above ground have become jealous of your success, and want to end your prosperity.
They are not strong enough to attack your undergound cities yet, but they have a plan to weaken you.
They plan to cut off the commerce between your cities. Mounting huge hydraulic pistons above your underground highways, they force the pistons down and close your roads.
You must stop them, if they cut off your travel, then they can attack each city seperately and defeat you.
You are the vailiant one who has been chosen to save the roads. You are the driver of a massive trolley, carrying blocks built to stop the pistons. At every road, the pistons are coming down with a known force. Your job is to put blocks under the pistons that have a greater strength than the force of the piston coming down(You can see the current force in the Force area on the left of the screen).
Your friends are busily building the blocks, they appear in a chute on the left side of the road. Unfortunatly, they are working very rapidly, so they cannot give you the strongest blocks all the time. The blocks will have a resistive strength of 1-10.
Every piston will be coming down over at least two stacks of blocks. The piston will shatter the weakest blocks in the stacks if they add up to less than the piston force.
Your goal is to have the weakest blocks in the stacks under a piston total more strength than the force of the piston coming down on them. So, a piston decending with a force of 7 will shatter the weakest blocks in the stacks under it if the weakest blocks add up to less than 7. But, if they are greater, that piston will be stopped! So if there are two stacks under a 7 piston, and the weakest block in each stack is 4, then the total is 8, and the piston will stop.
You control the direction of your trolley either with the keyboard or the mouse, you can tell Piston which you want to use in the Preferences box. When you first get Piston, the keys will be set to: Right arrow-move right, Left arrow-move left, Up arrow-stop, 'F' - stack block, and 'C'- change speed.
The trolley can go slow,medium, or fast, you can change speeds either by clicking in the S M F boxes or by using the speed change key.
You stack a block by moving under the position you want the block, and clicking the mouse or pressing the Fire key.
You can reject a block (if it's too weak for your purposes) by clicking the mouse or pressing the Fire key while the trolley is under the new block chute. The block will slide offscreen and the next will drop onto the trolley.
You have one other command to use, if you really need it. You have a limited supply of Bombs.
If you get in serious trouble, press the Bomb key (initially set to the space bar) and a bomb will go off, forcing all the pistons to the top of the screen, allowing you more time to build a stack. Use bombs wisely, you don't have any to waste!
Scoring:
When you stop all the pistons in a level, you get the value of all the blocks remaining. So, don't just stop the pistons, but build tall stacks to get the best score!
You will also get bonuses for saving cities.
There are ten cities in your underground country, each linked by 1 to 8 tunnel segments. Each time you stop the pistons in all the tunnels connecting two cities, you will get bonus points, and also will have a chance to look at the map. This let's you know how you are doing, and also gives you time to pause.
Rescuing some cities will also give you bonus bombs or trolleys.
Occasionally, flashing boxes will appear beneath the pistons. These are special events, they can either help you (they may give you points, or bombs) or they can hurt you (cut the strength of a stack in half). To earn them, you have to flip a block through them before they disappear or a piston reaches them.
When you finish a game (either by saving all the cities, or by running out of trolleys) you will get a certificate celebrating your success. You can print the certificate if you wish by selecting 'Print' from the File menu.
Piston is brought to you as ShareWare from
RavenWare Software
22045 McClellan Rd.
Cupertino, CA 95014
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