Torus
When you play TORUS, you will see a
pegat the bottom of the screen. You control this peg with the arrow keys (the peg's use is described in detail below). Above the peg, there are threechutes,all of which are empty. The object of TORUS is to prevent these chutes from filling up with Tori (i.e.Toruses) which fall from the top of the screen and settle inside the chutes.Different colored tori (four colors in all) will immediately begin falling from the top of the screen and will come to rest inside the chutes. If you do nothing, the chutes will soon fill up, and, as soon as one of the chutes overflows, the game will end. However, by rearranging the tori within the chutes, you can cause tori to disappear, thereby preventing the chutes from overflowing.
A horizontal
rowof tori will disappear when all the tori in that row are the same color. A row of tori is comprised of one torus from each chute. For instance, the torus at the bottom of the left chute, the torus at the bottom of the middle chute, and the torus at the bottom of the right chute, taken together, comprise row 1. The three tori (one from each chute) that rest on top of row 1 comprise row 2, etc. To prevent the chutes from overflowing, you must continually rearrange the tori in the chutes, align the colors across rows, and thereby make rows of tori disappear.You rearrange tori using the aforementioned
pegat the bottom of the screen. Your arrow keys control the peg. Left-arrow moves the peg left. Right-arrow moves the peg right. Using these keys, you can position the peg under either the left, middle, or right chute. Down-arrow removes a torus from the bottom of the chute above the peg and places it on the peg. The other tori in that chute drop down one row to fill the void left by the torus which is now on the peg. Up-arrow removes the top-most torus from the peg and places it at the bottom of the chute above the peg. All the other tori in the chute move up one row to make room for the new torus.You score points every time you align like-colored tori such that a row disappears. The number of points depends on the skill level you choose at the start of the game. But, you get twice that number of points if you arrange the existing tori in the chutes so that a new torus falling into a chute causes the row to disappear immediately! This way, the more often you are "ahead of the game," the higher you score.
Confused yet? Try watching the demo and then re-reading these instructions. While watching the demo, pay attention to the tori in the chutes, not the ones that are falling. When all the tori in one row are the same color, that row will flash briefly and disappear. Any tori above that row will then move down to fill the void left by the row that disappeared. This happens slowly in the demo to let you see what's going on, but it happens almost instantaneously when you are playing.
There are three skill levels: beginner, intermediate, and expert. The only differences between levels are the speed at which the tori fall and the number of points scored for each row that disappears. At expert level, you score more points for each row of tori that disappears, but the tori fall faster!
As you play, you will notice that several things happen. The capacity of the chutes decreases steadily so the chutes overflow more easily. Watch out! If a chute is full when it decreases in size, it overflows and the game ends. You'll know a chute is about to decrease in size when the top of the chute starts flashing on and off. Be sure the chutes have room to decrease in size when they start to flash! Eventually, when the chutes get small enough, TORUS figures you need a bigger challenge so the capacity of your peg is decreased by one! Fortunately for you, when this happens, the chutes revert to their original (large) size before starting to shrink all over again! As you improve, TORUS finds other ways to challenge you; but I'll let you figure those out for yourself.
As the game progresses, the calculations in the computer become more complex causing the program to slow down. To remedy this, TORUS constantly monitors its execution speed and simplifies the animation when execution slows. This makes the animation appear a bit jumpy, but it ensures that all scores are created equal! So, if the animation suddenly changes, or the tori stop rotating altogether and just fall straight down, don't worry, just buy a faster computer!
If you don't like the simplified animation and you have a VGA display system, you can force TORUS to run in EGA mode by typing torus /ega at the DOS prompt. Of course, the graphics aren't nearly as good, but the program runs faster and the simplified animation isn't needed until later in the game. (8086, 8088, and some 286 computers run best in EGA mode).
There are two additional keyboard controls:
- You can pause the program at any time using the <Pause> key built into your keyboard.
- The <RETURN> key is the
boss key.Pressing it at any time DURING PLAY will abort the game immediately.
At first I couldn't figure out this game at all, so I dumped the whole instructions here. Once you've understood it, it becomes quite clear, which doesn't mean that it's easy. Though there are some parallels to Columns, Torus is really very different from any other game I've ever played.
Interesting enough only the VGA mode is hi-res; the EGA mode the author recommends for slower computers is 320×200.
