''Monuments of Mars'' is a third-person

puzzle-platform game A platform game (often simplified as platformer and sometimes called a jump 'n' run game) is a sub-genre of action video games in which the core objective is to move the player character between points in an environment. Platform games are charac ...

developed by Scenario Software for

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

and compatible systems. It was published by

Apogee Software 3D Realms Entertainment ApS is a video game publisher based in Aalborg, Denmark. Scott Miller founded the company in his parents' home in Garland, Texas, in 1987 as Apogee Software Productions to release his game '' Kingdom of Kroz''. In the ...

. The game consists of four 20-level episodes, the first episode being

shareware Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer ...

, the rest being commercial software. It is similar to the games ''

Arctic Adventure The ''Adventure'' series is a collection of children's adventure novels by Willard Price. The original series, comprising 14 novels, was published between 1949 and 1980, and chronicles the adventures of teenagers Hal and Roger Hunt as they travel ...

'' and ''

Pharaoh's Tomb ''Pharaoh's Tomb'' is an MS-DOS platform game created by George Broussard (misspelled as "Broussad") and published by Apogee Software. The game uses CGA graphics based on the FAST (Fluid Animation Software Technology) engine. Notoriously, objec ...

'' (developed by

George Broussard George Broussard is an American video game producer and designer, one of the creators of the '' Duke Nukem'' series ( Todd Replogle, Allen Blum, and Scott Miller being the others). Broussard released his early games under the name Micro F/X. In ...

and also published by Apogee) but uses an unrelated engine. The game was discontinued, and was released as

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the f ...

on March 20, 2009. It was re-released in 2015 on

Steam Steam is a substance containing water in the gas phase, and sometimes also an aerosol of liquid water droplets, or air. This may occur due to evaporation or due to boiling, where heat is applied until water reaches the enthalpy of vaporization ...

with support for

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

and

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

Plot

The player is tasked with rescuing

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeeding t ...

astronauts that have gone missing in the fictional "monuments of Mars". Toward the end of each episode, groups of captured astronauts can be released from "energy rings". At the end of the final episode, markings on a "face" object reveal that some aliens were using Mars as a base to study humans from afar, but abandoned it and left their automatic intruder capture system switched on, hence the capture of the astronauts.

Gameplay

The player controls an astronaut who must navigate through twenty levels on the planet Mars to finish the game. Most levels require the player to enter a door to advance to the next level, but earlier levels have the player simply move to the opposite side of the screen. The player has the capability to jump and shoot with a gun. This is useful to operate

switch In electrical engineering, a switch is an electrical component that can disconnect or connect the conducting path in an electrical circuit, interrupting the electric current or diverting it from one conductor to another. The most common type of ...

es which open doors or turn off obstacles. A unique point to this game is that the player has no limit of lives. A player may restart a level as many times as necessary. If a player can collect the letters in the word "MARS" scattered throughout the level in order, a large bonus is added to the player's score. The game advertises cheat sheets available on registration. The game's save files are quite simple: mars1.sv1 through mars4.sv1 each contain two bytes, representing the number of completed levels and the number of remaining shots, and mars1.sv2 through mars4.sv2 contain the current score as an ASCII integer. A cheating player can therefore set these values to anything they like before restoring a saved game.

References

External links

Monuments of Mars page
at 3D Realms *

Includes maps of all levels {{Apogee Games DOS games MacOS games Puzzle-platformers 1991 video games Apogee games Freeware games Shareware games Video games developed in the United States Video games set on Mars Windows games NASA in fiction Single-player video games