Gemini Wing - Manual

"DIE MUTANT ALIEN SCUM"

Not the most friendly of newspaper headlines you must agree, especially
when it comes to promoting intergalactic relations, but then there has
always been a so-called gutter element to holo-journalism. (Not that
anyone can remember what a gutter is, these days, but the general
feeling is that it was something rather unpleasant, if vaguely useful.)

And it was that headling 'Die Mutant Alien Scum' that caused all the
bother when it appeared in a space- wide holo-edition of the SoonDay
Spirit. After several centuries of reading "little green men turned me
into a potato" stories invented by SoonDay Spirit journalists, aliens
throughout space were beginning to get just a little bit fed up with
humanity. Naturally, human diplomats did their best to repair the
damage, but your average little green man reading the SoonDay Spirit on
the top of a Venusian omnibus wasn't swayed. As time went on, he got
more and more fed up with being slandered and vilified in the
holo-outpourings of a small and insignificant bipedal race that lived on
a dirty little planet in the Sol system.

When the crazed SoonDay Spirit headline writer finally flipped his
xenophobic lid and came up with DIE MUTANT ALIEN SCUM as a front-page
lead story for the early edition one Tuesday, the clamour of outrage
coming from the top of the omnibuses throughout the galaxy could be
heard on Earth. Alien anger continued to mount, and by the middle of
Wednesday morning political leaders on every civilised world in the
galaxy realised there was only one course of action open to them if they
wanted to get re-elected by their people: declare war on Earth.

So by lunchtime that Wednesday every civilised race in the galaxy had
declared war on Earth, the human race, and in particular all journalists
working for the SoonDay Spirit. Expecting an easy victory in the game
'Earth vs The Rest of God's Creations', alien hordes set out for the
time-space adjacent to Earth and prepared to do battle with humanity's
feeble space fleets. But they hadn't reckoned on the ingenuity of
Earth's weapons scientists; they didn't realise that the Gemini Wing
fighter project was already complete. And their spies had spent too much
time on Earth chasing girlies and turning them into potatoes to report
back on the development of awesome weapon systems such as the Windscreen
Wiper of Death...

What at first seemed to be an easy victory for alien forces turned into
a bitterly-fought conflict, a space- war that is still raging in several
dimensions. Which is about where you come in, as the pilot of a Gemini
Wing fighter. Pausing only to shout the battle cry of the crack GW
regiment you belong to - "Die Alien Mutant Scum" - you leap into the
control seat of your craft, warp to a vertically-scrolling etherworld
and start fighting the good fight...

KILLING MUTANT ALIEN SCUM

Simple really  as the Gemini Wing pilot training manual says, it's just
like playing an arcade game. Press the fire button and deal out laser
death.

But there's more. A strange paradox in the fabric of reality causes
additional weapon systems in your fighter to materialise when you blast
certain aliens. Small clawed creatures cause a single gunball to
materialise when they turn up their claws and cough their last, while
porky fat clawed aliens - known as 'Bringers' - can yield as many as
eight gunballs in their death warps.

"Collect up gunballs whenever possible and then use them by pressing and
holding fire to help you do the job of dealing death to the mutant alien
scum" is what it says in the Gemini Wing pilot training manual, and the
guy who wrote it got it right. (There is a third, undocumented method of
acquiring gunballs that he doesn't mention, but that involves stealing
them from a colleague on a two-man mission and is far too underhand to
mention here.)

A GUMBY'S GUIDE TO GUNBALLS

All you need now is a run-down on what those gunball jobbies do for you,
and it's off into space for spot of killing. So here's an extract from
the Gemini Wing pilot training manual.

- Three way fire ball
- 2,000 points
- 5,000 points
- 10,000 points
- Alien seeking missiles
- Fire wall
- Speed-up
- Spiralling circle of death
- Windscreen wiper of death
- Extra life

The above weapons (gunballs) are picked up in three ways, first is by
shooting a small, relatively harmless, clawed alien. These carry one extra
weapon and so should always be shot, these take only one hit to destroy.
Second is by shooting what is known as a 'Bringer', this is a larger clawed
alien which usually carries approx eight gunballs, shooting it causes the
gunballs to cycle through the different weapons. The third method of
collecting gunballs causes the most interplayer hatred ever seen in arcade
games, this is the ability to steal the other players gunball tail thus
depriving him of his extra weapons. Tail stealing can only take place if
the victim has more than three gunballs.

CONTROLS

1 or 2 players. In one player mode you can use Joystick or Keyboard. In
two player mode you can use twin Joysticks or Joystick and Keyboard.

JOYSTICK

Press the Fire button to shoot and hold down the Fire button to fire a
gunball.

Keyboard

         UP/Q
          ^
          |
LEFT/O <--+--> RIGHT/P
          |
          v
        DOWN/A

Press the Space Bar to fire and hold down the Space Bar to fire a gunball.
F1 aborts the game. F10 pauses game.
