A twin-stick firefighting action game for the Atari 8-bit
Fires are breaking out at an industrial building. It's your job to find and save the workers trapped inside, and put out fires along the way.
You control a firefighter with an unlimited amount of fire extinguishing agent. Spray the fire to quench it, but beware because it spreads quickly! Find the workers trapped in the room, and help them navigate to the exit. They are overcome by smoke and fear, and will wander aimlessly unless you are close by to guide them. They can perish if they end up too close to a large fire!
This game works best with a twin-stick controller configuration (as seen in arcade games such as Robotron: 2084 and Smash TV). One stick controls your movement, the other is used to spray. You may swap which stick is used for which.
Single joystick play is supported; simply hold the fire button while pushing the stick to spray. However, you cannot move while spraying when using this configuration.
You can get or build a joystick coupler for Atari CX-40 controllers, or get dedicated twin-stick controllers for the Atari; I enjoy my Edladdin Super Twin 78 (available from the AtariAge store).
Some rooms contain crates and/or barrels which you can push out of your way if they block your path. Be careful how you move them, though; you can only push, you cannot pull them! (You can also push workers if they get in your way.) Pipes pump gas through some rooms, and any cracks will leak this flammable material into the air. If you can reach the valve, you can turn off the flow. If there's an ax, you can pick it up. Instead of pushing crates, you will destroy them (they may take two hits). Be careful navigating near pipes once you have the ax, as you will damage them!
When fire spreads to oil barrels or gas leaking from pipes it will cause an explosion, spreading even more fire. Beware of chain reactions!
Read the full instructions in the ZIP file, or by pressing [?] or [Help] on the title screen of the disk (ATR) version of the game. You can also view the README on GitHub. (Note: this is the source code repository, so may reflect changes not yet available in an official release of the game!)
This game is released as open source, under the GNU General Public License v3.0.
Releases are provided as ZIP archives which contain the C source code, a stand-alone XEX executable, and an ATR disk image version. The disk version includes a splash screen, built-in help text, and a top-10 high score table that saves back to disk. (The ATR disk image is set up such that if it's mounted off of a TNFS server by players using a FujiNet, it will save their score back to disk image. See "High Score storage for Legacy Games" on the FujiNet wiki.)
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By Bill Kendrick, New Breed Software, 2023.