*********

Welcome to Project 64!

The goal of Project 64 is to preserve Commodore 64 related 
documents
in electronic text format that might otherwise cease to exist with 
the
rapid advancement of computer technology and declining interest in 
8-
bit computers on the part of the general population.

Extensive efforts were made to preserve the contents of the 
original
document.  However, certain portions, such as diagrams, program
listings, and indexes may have been either altered or sacrificed 
due
to the limitations of plain vanilla text.  Diagrams may have been
eliminated where ASCII-art was not feasible.  Program listings may 
be
missing display codes where substitutions were not possible.  
Tables
of contents and indexes may have been changed from page number
references to section number references. Please accept our 
apologies
for these limitations, alterations, and possible omissions.

Document names are limited to the 8.3 file convention of DOS. The
first characters of the file name are an abbreviation of the 
original
document name. The version number of the etext follows next. After
that a letter may appear to indicate the particular source of the
document. Finally, the document is given a .TXT extension.

The author(s) of the original document and members of Project 64 
make
no representations about the accuracy or suitability of this 
material
for any purpose.  This etext is provided "as-is".  Please refer to 
the
warantee of the original document, if any, that may included in 
this
etext.  No other warantees, express or implied, are made to you as 
to
the etext or any medium it may be on.  Neither the author(s) nor 
the
members of Project 64 will assume liability for damages either 
from
the direct or indirect use of this etext or from the distribution 
of
or modification to this etext.

*********

The Project 64 etext of the Toy Bizarre help file. Original 
Windows(R)
help file obtained from the Activision C64 15 Pack was supplied by
Fandango. Converted by the Basic Bombardier. Some of the 
information
in this etext is assumed to be close enough to the original 
hardcopy
version until an orginal can be converted, which is likely to be
called TOYBZ10B.TXT.

TOYBZ10A.TXT, March 1996, etext #24

*********

Toy Bizarre

Contents

 General Description   [ 1.0 ]
 How To Play           [ 2.0 ]
 Scoring               [ 3.0 ]
 Hints                 [ 4.0 ]
 Game History          [ 5.0 ]



[ 1.0 ] General Description

It's a living.

Pop balloons. Catch toys. This much sounds easy.

Did they tell you first to hurdle toys and make them glow? They
mentioned these robot Hefty Hildas? "No?", you might ask.

And turning off valves, they brought that up? Well, turn them off.

You should know to take Coffee Breaks whenever they come around.
Floating Faces, too. An extra life is a nice thing, not to be 
sneezed
at.

Maybe it's time you should be beginning?

A Little Something Special For You!

Toys! Your favorites! And you thought I forgot. Only this is real
different. In this game, you catch the toys, or they catch you. 
You'll
like the robot dolls, and you'll love the Safety Check. Coffee 
Breaks,
too; they rev you up, just like the real thing! And there are 
valves
and Piston Platforms and a skipping skeleton and....well. I don't 
want
to give it all away! Anyway, saw this and thought of you.

Heh! Heh! Heh!

Guarantee

This toy is guaranteed. Guaranteed to pull you in - and keep you.
Guaranteed to have you moving at manic speeds. Guaranteed to put 
you
through your paces.

Once people played with toys. Now dawns the day when toys have 
their
way, and play with people. You, for example.

Guide Merton the Maintenance Man through a night at the Gizmoe
Automated Toy Works. If you can. If you Dare!

The toys are in revolt, and Merton's got trouble. Balloons fill up 
at
valves. Turn the valves off - but watch out for Hefty Hilda. You 
don't
really want to make her acquaintance. But you will.

Pop the balloons or toys will escape - and make for Merton! (Relax 
-
it's only a game...) If Merton meets Hilda or a toy, his skeleton
skips off into the wings. As in angel's wings - get it?

Of course, you can stun toys. Jump over them. That's right. A 
stunned
toy glows, so you'll know. Touch it and it's yours. Oh, and about
Piston Platforms. Should you or Hilda get caught on one, you'll go
winging through the roof. As in goof.

Give you a break you say? Gladly. Touch the cup on a Coffee Break 
and
you'll be trottin' hot. Or reach the Floating Face and find a free
life. Safety in numbers.

But not necessarily in Safety Checks. Turn off all the valves 
before
Hefty Hilda hits you or - well, it's not a pretty picture.

We guarantee it.



[ 2.0 ] How to Play

Basics

How to Start

Press F1 to start.

Live a Little.

Begin with four lives. Acquire an additional life for each 10,000
points earned. Game ends when you run out of lives.

Indicator.

A row of balloons (top left) indicates how many balloons are 
remaining
for you to deal with in this round.

Valves.

Balloons fill up at valves. If not popped, balloons release toys. 
Toys
work their way to the bottom level where they hop into one of two 
IN
bins, only to re-emerge as balloons at an open valve. Of the six
VALVES that appear during the regular shift, all but the top two 
can
be turned off. Hefty Hilda turns them back on, so be alert. If all
four valves are off at the end of an "hour", you earn 4,000 extra
points!

All valves which appear during a SAFETY CHECK can be turned off. 
The
faster you turn them all off, the bigger the bonus.

Piston Platforms

Piston Platforms are paired and appear along runways. Jump on an
elevated one and its mate pops up. Toys caught on one as it pops 
up
are stunned for a while. These can be touched without jumping over
them. If Merton or Hefty Hilda are caught on a Platform, they
disappear up off the screen. Merton loses a life if "popped", or 
gains
500 points for "boosting" Hilda.



Joystick

Use the joystick to move Merton to the left or right, even in mid-
air.
To jump, press the joystick button.



[ 3.0 ] Scoring

 Close a valve:           40 points
 Jump over a toy:         10 points
 Pick up a stunned toy:  100 points
 Pop a balloon:          200 points
 Stun a toy on a piston:  30 points
 Time bonus:              50 points per minute remaining in the 
hour



[ 4.0 ] Hints

Mark Turmell, Designer and Programmer

"Definitely keep an eye on the valves so you can pop the balloons
before the toys come out. Try to stay towards the top of the 
levels,
especially on later waves. The toys start moving so fast that it's
much safer to be above them so they don't fall on you."

"Listen, it's important to remember that you can control Merton 
while
he's in the air. Also, the screen 'wraps around'; that is, move 
off
the left side and you'll appear on the right. Careful not to run 
into
toys or Hilda when you do! Enjoy yourselves!"



[ 5.0 ] Game History

Mark Turmell, Designer and Programmer

"Toy Bizarre started as an animation of a man running across the
screen. It was based on a really competitive two-player arcade 
game
called 'Mario Brothers' that was in the arcades back in 1984. The
first thing I did was write an editor that allowed me to build 
screens,
floors, backgrounds, platforms, and so on. Mario Brothers had a 
few
levels that repeated - Toy Bizarre ended up with about 30 
different
backgrounds or levels."

The next thing to determine was a theme for the game. "I was into
'cutesy' games at the time, like 'Pengo' and 'QBert'. I had this 
list
of funny names written down, and usually I'd come up with the name 
of
the game first, then develop the game around that. 'Toy Bizarre' 
was
one of the names I had, and the game grew from that. The idea was 
to
develop a game where the action took place in a toy factory, so we
added things like balloons, wind-up toys, dolls, and so on."

"I was also into fast action games, where you get into really 
tight
spots and have to blast your way out. One of my favorite games, 
even
to this day, is Robotron 2084. The game designers at Williams
Electronics still play Robotron daily. Our machine is set at level 
ten,
and we've all gotten so good, we can still play for half an hour 
at a
time, and get millions of points. It's really amazing - the action 
and
pace of that game makes it really timeless. That's why control is 
so
important in the games I design. Toy Bizarre had really good 
control,
where you could move the character very precisely while he was 
jumping,
and so on."

"Up until around the time Toy Bizarre came out, Activision had 
been
concentrating on Atari VCS and other cartridge-based systems like 
the
Intellivision, Colecovision, and so on. Dan [Thompson] and I had 
been
playing around with the Apple II and C64, so we were used to more 
of a
PC environment. As an interesting side note, Toy Bizarre and Zone
Ranger were the first disk-based games Activision ever released. 
Up
until then, it had been all cartridge based. A few people from
Activision recognized the potential of the disk-based home-
computer-
game market and spearheaded an effort to get the company moving in
that direction."

One of the negative side effects of putting a game as huge as Toy
Bizarre on a cartridge was that it needed to be compressed. "It 
was
originally released in cartridge form as well as disk, but it 
needed 3
different forms of compression to get it to fit on the cart. 
That's
more compression than I've done on any game since then. Other
programmers pulled it apart to see how we fit that much 
information on
a single cartridge." With the program being so deeply compressed, 
the
decompression took a fair amount of time, so "we put in the 
'flashing
colors' screen at the beginning, where the border flashes colors
really quickly, during the 'load time' for the original cartridge. 
The
disk version was just a straight dump of the program's object 
code, so
the flashing intro screen ended up on the disk, but it really 
didn't
need to, since there was room on the disk."

The inspiration for Hefty Hilda "was a game called 'Berzerk', that 
had
a 'smiley face' enemy that came around to clear you off the board 
at
the end of a level. A lot of the games I designed had some sort of
enemy who came around to clear you out, or keep you moving during 
the
level. The 'Coffee Break' speed boost was cool, too. That is 
another
game element I use over and over. It showed up as the 'Turbo' 
button
on 'NBA JAM', and as the 'Fast Shoes' in 'Smash TV' - both were 
coin-
op games I designed later for Williams Electronics."

After Toy Bizarre, Mark wrote a game called Fast Tracks - The 
Computer
Slot Car Construction Set for Activision. Shortly thereafter, he 
left
Activision, and took a brief vacation from the game industry. He
returned to games a couple years later, working for Hasbro 
Electronics
with other Activision alumni David Pitfall, Little Computer People
Crane and Rob Fullup, who worked on Zenji with Matt Hubbard. 
Hasbro
ultimately closed down its video game department, so Mark moved to
Williams Electronics in Chicago, where he is currently employed. 
His
coin-op credits include Smash TV, NBA JAM, Total Carnage and the
recently released WWF Wrestlemania.

*********

End of the Project 64 etext of the Toy Bizarre help file.

********* 
