                           Mouse Impossible
                           ================

When I was about 8 years old I used to love getting tubes and boards and
piles of books to construct long courses over which to run marbles or,
better still, ball bearings. I was facinated by the idea that if you kept
everything the same the ball would end up in the same place. It never did
of course but surely that was due to not quite starting it off the same
way (chaos theory hadn't been invented then).

Now we know the world is a cantankerous place and it's best not to try to
fight it. This game recreates the marble runs (or bounces in this case)
and this time we don't have to rely on luck.

The idea of the game is to knock out a mouse which is trying to steal some
cheese. The cheese is wired up to a cannon which fires a ball when the
mouse lands on it. On every level the ball will miss the mouse and the
mouse will get away. All you have to do is put one or more of a selection
of objects in place to guide the ball to hit the mouse. The objects range
from the passive (bricks) to the active (springs, cannons, sponges,
magnets, oil, balloons). But these objects can only be placed once the
mouse is on it's way to the cheese.

The objects can be flipped over in four ways by clicking the right mouse
button. They can only be placed on top of other things or on the floor
(this is called gravity) and they are bottom heavy so if you flip
something upside down and drop it it will turn over. When an object is
upside down, however, it will stick on the underside of other things.

Once the mouse has been hit it's on to the next level. There are 30 levels.

To the right of the main screen are the gadgets to control the game. 

At the top is a simple GO or STOP icon. Until you click on GO you can only
do general things like change level or exit.

Below the GO/STOP icon are the ten objects you can use in the game. These
are:

    Brick  - it's a brick
    Column - it's quite tall
    Sloped brick - its a brick with a sloped side
    Another sloped brick - so is this
    Spring - this will send the ball upward if it hits it (or downward if
             it is turned over) in the same general direction as it was
             travelling when it hit. It's a sort of springy action.
    Cannon - if the ball hits this it is fired out of the mouth of the
             cannon)
    Sponge - if the ball hits this it just drops
    Magnet - if the ball hits this it clings to any surface and moves in
             the direction of the arrow on the magnet for a while
    Oil -    if the ball hits this the mouse loses height
    Gas -    this gives the ball a balloon ride for a short time

There is a counter showing how many of each are available. A red cross
means none left.

To select an object just click on it.

At the bottom of the screen is a white flag. This means quit the game. You
will be asked "Sure?". Type Y to exit.

Next to the white flag is the LEVEL option. Each level has a four
character code. To return to a level keep a note of the code. When you
click on LEVEL you will be asked to enter the code. If you get it right
you go there.

I hope you enjoy it.


Steve Holt         October 1992