What is Piston?

Piston is a combination arcade-thinking game, it takes fast reflexes as well as planning and calculation.

The Story;
You and your friends live in  vast underground cities, connected to each other by tunnels.
For years your lives have been uncomplicated, and you prospered and advanced.  But now, a peril threatens your whole society.  Those living above ground have become jealous of your success, and want to end your prosperity.

They are not strong enough to attack your undergound cities yet, but they have a plan to weaken you.
They plan to cut off the commerce between your cities.   Mounting huge hydraulic pistons above your underground highways, they force the pistons down and close your roads.

You must stop them, if they cut off your travel, then they can attack each city seperately and defeat you.
You are  the vailiant one who has been chosen to save the roads.  You are the driver of a massive trolley, carrying blocks built to stop the pistons.  At every road, the pistons are coming down with a known force.  Your job is to put blocks under the pistons that have a greater strength than the force of the piston coming down(You can see the current force in the Force area on the left of the screen).

Your friends are busily building the blocks, they appear in a chute on the left side of the road. Unfortunatly, they are working very rapidly, so they cannot give you the strongest blocks all the time.  The blocks will have a resistive strength of 1-10.
Every piston will be coming down over at least two stacks of blocks.  The piston will shatter the weakest blocks in the stacks if they add up to less than the piston force.

Your goal is to have the weakest blocks in the stacks under a piston total more strength than the force of the piston coming down on them.  So, a piston decending with a force of 7 will shatter the weakest blocks in the stacks under it if the weakest blocks add up to less than 7.  But, if they are greater, that piston will be stopped!  So if there are two stacks under a 7 piston, and the weakest block in each stack is 4, then the total is 8, and the piston will stop.

You control the direction of your trolley either with the keyboard or the mouse, you can tell Piston which you want to use in the Preferences box.  When you first get Piston, the keys will be set to: Right arrow-move right, Left arrow-move left,  Up arrow-stop, 'F' - stack block, and 'C'- change speed.

 

Download Piston for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

System Requirements

From Mac OS 6.0 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Architecture: 68K

Mac OS 6.x - Mac OS 9.2.2

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II