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Varia v.1.8					    	
						    	
Copyright 2007, Charlie Ngo		            		
						    	  
Visit www.kairos.110mb.com for other games/ info. 		  
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Table of Contents:

1. Overview
2. Menu Options
3. Quick Controls
4. Extra Settings


1. Overview:

NOTE: You can learn easily by watching the menu tutorial.

Varia is a game made for a competition held by www.shmup-dev.com, where the theme
was "Options", or simply satellite units that follow your main ship in some way.
This game is a "shmup", or shoot-em-up, of the arcade variety that many grew up with,
not the modern FPS games. In Varia, you control a ship with which you must defeat 4
levels chocked full of enemies, bosses and mini-bosses. The game draws inspiration 
from many other shmups, such as Raiden 2, Ikaruga, Gradius V, and Cho Ren Sha 68k.

Varia uses options differently than most shmups do. When you destroy a power-up enemy,
a group of 3 power-up appears. The red one is to upgrade your main firepower. The yellow
one gives you an option. The green one gives you a 1-hit shield. You can have up to 4
upgrades for both the firepower and the amount of options.

When you obtain an option, you'll notice that it can trail after your original positions.
The main point of an option in Varia is to absorb an ability and then proceed to fire it.
Your option starts out green. Once it gets hit by any enemy weapon (besides boss weapons)
then it captures the skill and then gains the ability to use it. For example, if there was
an enemy that shot homing missiles, if that hits an option, you then gain a homing missile
ability.

Trying to absorb abilities with your options trailing after you can be a pain. You can
freeze your options in their places relative to your ship by tapping X (there is also
a toggle option in the menu that allows you to hold instead). Once frozen, you can easily
manipulate your option(s) to catch certain abilities. 

Sometimes you want to get different types on abilities on your options. You'll notice that
a "selected" option has a green ring around it, and a flashing square on the HUD. You can
select the other options by pressing the up and down arrow keys. To "release" an option's 
ability, you can press C on the selected option, which makes the ability disappear. The 
options are absolutely crucial to getting anywhere in the game, as they are an important 
highlight of the game.

You will encounter many enemies, 4 bosses and 4 mini-bosses in the game. There are 10 types
of abilities that you can absorb:

 -Regular Vulcan
 -Homing Missile 
 -Nuclear Missile 
 -Laser
 -Curvy Shot
 -Explosive Blast
 -Charge Shot
 -Chaining Shuriken
 -Flamethrower
 -Wave Shot

It is up to you to find out what each ability does. The Regular Vulcan shot is something
that you'll end up getting if you aren't good enough to obtain the others; it is the most
common type of enemy bullet.

While you play, you may notice on the left HUD that color "chains" appear everytime you 
kill a type of enemy with the same color in a row. These are extra bonus points awarded to
people who kill same colored enemies (excluding large enemies) in a row, and the bonus will
be reset as soon as you hit a different color or large enemy.

While shooting at an enemy with high hit points, you'll notice that the frame flashes as the
enemy is being hit. If the interior color of an enemy is black, then that enemy or part is 
invincible until you destroy something else first. If the interior color is purple, then
these types of enemies cannot be destroyed. Also, when shooting at bosses, you will notice
a color change from a white frame to red as the hit points get closer to zero.

You gain an additional life for each boss destroyed.

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2. Menu Options:
There are 3 difficulty levels, 2 gfx (graphics) settings, background settings (turn on or off), 
and an option toggle feature that you can turn on or off. If you turn it off, you have to 
hold down X to freeze options. If you leave toggle on, all you have to do is to tap X to go 
into freeze mode, and tap X again to leave it.

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3. Quick Controls:

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|Button	        |  Action					
|---------------------------------------------  		
|Arrow Keys --|- Navigate menu, move ship, select options     
|Z -------------|- Fire, select menu options, charge (ability)  
|X -------------|- Freeze options, initiate slow mode 		
|C -------------|- Clear selected option ability		
|Enter ---------|- Select menu options				
|Esc -----------|- Brings up pause menu in-game			
|_______________________________________________________________

4. Extra Settings (Foreign Keyboards, Surfaces):

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Surfaces (Boss explosion distortion effect)

There are a few more extra settings not immediately obvious in the game. If your graphics
card cannot handle surfaces, you may turn the graphics level to "Low Gfx", or if you want
to enjoy "High Gfx" settings with no surfaces, then edit the "set.ini" file in your game
directory and look for "surfaces". Change the 1 to a 0 to disable surfaces.

Foreign Keyboards(QWERTZ, AZERTY)

2 foreign keyboards, QWERTZ and AZERTY, do not have the Z button close to the X and C buttons.
QWERTZ keyboards switch the Z and Y keys, while AZERTY keyboards switch the Z and W keys.
To swap the keys for the game, go into "set.ini" in your game directory and look for your
type of keyboard, and simply edit the 0 to a 1.

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Copyright 2007, Charlie Ngo.
http://kairos.110mb.com

