Maelstrom - played by a bot

A heavily modified version of the open source 3.0.6 version of the classic asteroid game: Maelstrom. The player is controlled by a bot or "artificial intelligence." The bot is programmed so it knows when to shoot and not to shoot, when to use shields, and how to rotate and thrust for collision avoidance, targeting and target intercept. The bot can fire as fast as the auto fire bonus, because it runs at game speed, but the AI is constrained by all the same rules as in an unmodified version. The bot is not perfect, so it makes mistakes. The original sound engine had no panning and a limited amount of polyphony. CSound has been employed with the 8 bit sound samples to render the sound effects in "unlimited" polyphony with HRTF horizontal and vertical panning. Maelstrom was written and distributed as Mac Shareware in 1992 by Ambrosia Software, Inc. The game is an addictive version of the arcade classic, Asteroids, with sprite based graphics and 8 bit sampled sounds. It was later ported to Linux by Sam Lantinga (slouken) using the SDL gaming library he wrote. The source code is GPL'd and should be able run on all platforms supported by SDL. The port even has a code for a networked deathmatch mode. Thanks to Andrew Welch, Ian Gilman and especially Sam Lantinga, for releasing the code to this awesome time waste of a game. (edit: it looks like because of the length of the video, YouTube's encoder downsampled the source before encoding. Apologies for the crappy quality)