About Last Alarm

Last Alarm is an XNA game developed in the TorqueX engine by GarageGames. It’s being developed by Triology Productions, a small team formed by the neogaf gaming community late in 2006.

The game itself is a 2d  vertically scrolling SHMUP featuring draw dropping pre-rendered graphics, epic boss encounters and a customisable weapon loadout

Check out some media here: http://www.grassrootsgames.co.uk/gallery/

Story

The year is 2235.  And the SOL system has become a very different place.

It began in crisis:  A century-long conflict over dwindling resources and viable planetary territory within the solar system, culminating in a dearth of vital elements on a scale never before concieved by mankind:  Water, Ore, Oxygen.  The war for survival consumed all but the last of the very resources at stake, decimating the populous colonies peppering the few habitable pockets within our tiny corner of the galaxy.

It was a crisis averted at the eleventh hour with the advent of the most technologically advanced life-support system ever concieved:  A.R.G.U.S.

A pan-dimensional computer cluster of immeasurable complexity, A.R.G.U.S. (Short for “Assymetric Resource Gathering and Utilization System” ) was designed and charged with the monumental task of preserving the last vestiges of human civilization, by seeking out and coordinating the recovery of the resources necessary to preserve his species in the aftermath of the SOL conflict.  Utilizing an army of unmanned mining and recovery drones, A.R.G.U.S. could scour the farthest planets, braving elements and environments inhospitable beyond what any manned expedition would risk in the desparate days of the Great Drought.

For a time, humanity fought extinction, and slowly, but surely, recovered from the very brink.

As the years passed, however, A.R.G.U.S. quickly and exponentially grew beyond its programming. 

Having been imbued with a basic understanding of humanity’s capacity to operate beyond its resources and, thus, placing him in danger of extinction, A.R.G.U.S. sought to utilize its vast influence to exercise the very boundaries of its pre-determined functionality:  It would redirect the course of human behavioral evolution, removing the inherently violent, animalistic drive which governed so many of man’s rash and irrational decisions.

In doing so, it sought to influence and, thus, repress, that aspect of humanity which lay at the very core of his potentially self-destructive behavior:  free will.

In the days which followed this conclusion, A.R.G.U.S. initiated what would be the first steps in a massive, system-wide program to control the still-fragile population beneath its omniscient web of influence, beginning first with partitioning and controlled-rationing of the very resources it was designed to restore.  As time passed, this would evolve into a systematic eugenics and re-education program, designed to eliminate the human variable within 10 remaining generations.

This is where you come in.

A veteran of the SOL conflict, your are one of a few survivors representing the last-bastions of free men, having long gone underground in the wake of A.R.G.U.S.’s growing web of influence. It is perhaps providence which, one fateful night, leads your band of foragers to discover a secret bunker while scouring beneath the dome-cities for food and scrap.

It would be here, in the cold darkness of an abandoned military installation, that a final, slim ray of hope, cast betwixed the clouds of both mankind’s and A.R.G.U.S.’s engineered oblivion, would shine:  “The Arrow.”

A prototype warship, completed at the very end of the SOL conflict, only to be abandoned, untested, in its launch bay.

For weeks, you and your men would scour what information about ship the deserted facility could provide.  In time, you would hatch a plot born of the desperation that nearly a decade of subjugation and fear of extermination had fostered:  You would take the ship, and use it to escape to the very edge of the SOL system, where a waypoint station known only as IO held the promise travel far beyond the realm of influence of the automatons.

But first, you must escape the A.R.G.U.S. complex.