AUTS - The Ultimate Stress Relief Game

While Turboraketti was The Game that gave birth to the "cave flier" genre that grew incredibly popular especially in Finland in the 90's, AUTS was a simple, yet elegant clone of Turboraketti for PC's that launched a whole horde of further cave flier clones and cave flier inspired games, a trend that went on nearly for a whole decade.

AUTS (Finnish for "ouch") is a 2-4 player side scrolling game on split screen, where players control V-shaped space ships and try to destroy each other with bullets and a secondary equipped gun that can be chosen from an arsenal of two dozen imaginative weapons. Players can recharge their energy and switch weapons on landing pads spread throughout the levels. Levels were bitmap images with a key-color which indicated a space where the ships can fly. A dedicated color from the palette for water was also included, but water didn't flow as in some more modern cave fliers (like in Wings). Players were able to construct new levels with a tool that converted bitmap images into a format understood by the game.