Wire Fighter
Wire Fighter was originally released into "the wild" on September 22nd 2008 to take part in the fourth ShmupDev rapid prototyping session. All program, graphics and sound are copyright 2008 – this is version 0.9 of the program code with a future revision planned to add more detail at some point. Download Wire Fighter (1.00Mb archive)
Playing Wire Fighter
The idea is pretty simple in that the player controls the little grey ship with the cursor keyss or the regular movement controls on a joystick and uses either Z, the fire button or left mouse button to go blam blam lots at the attackers; the problem is that the stock weapon is pretty much garbage and to really do the business some heavier firepower is required. Since the ship is sporting a super-duper prototype Remote Fighter Control system, the obvious solution is to put it and indeed some of the attackers to good use. The RFC system, or “laser wire” as it’s been nicknamed by the test pilots trying it out, is a means to take control over someone else’s spaceship and basically use it as a support drone; the reason that the left mouse button acts as fire is because the player has a locking cursor under mouse control that, when the grappler is charged and ready, can be used to aim at a passing nasty and, with a click of the right mouse button, steal their electronic soul!
The status bar, positioned at the top left of the screen, will tell you everything you’ll need to know during play. The top bar is the ship’s shields, every impact will knock a sizeable chunk off them and if they’re all gone then its time to go "boom". The score is… well, it’s the score; keep one eye on it because certain actions score better than others. Finally we have the laser wire charging bar, when this is green the system is armed and ready to take over an attacker; to make things a bit easier during a fire fight, the locking cursor is also colour coded and will change from red to amber if locked on but without enough power to use the weapon or to green if fully ready to do it’s thing.
Minimum System Requirements
Compatible with Windows 2000, XP or Vista
Reqires DirectX 9
1GHz AMD Duron or equivalent with upwards of 256Mb of RAM
GeForce 4 or better video card.
Please note: Wire Fighter hasn’t been fully tested on lower specification machines, it was developed on a PC with lower specification than the minimum listed above so attempting to run it on a lower specification may well work but we’re going to be cautious; similarly, it should run on just about any version of Windows from 98 Second Edition onwards as long as DirectX 7 or above is installed but for "safety" we’re going to say Windows 2000 onwards.
