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TxK, Tempest 2000 Remake for PS Vita Demoed
If you happen to be one of the other five people who own an Atari Jaguar, you've probably played the excellent Tempest 2000. As chance would have it, a few months ago Llamasoft announced they were approached by Sony to write TxK, based "...on the essence of the original T2K. ... . We're not going to overload you with ultra psychedelia, but we will make it fluid and colourful and awesome-looking ... We're going to give you a perfect treat for your eyes, ears and thumbs with a modern extrapolation of one of the best shooters ever made on hardware that's just perfectly suited for it, and in a way that retains the purity of the original design."
A couple of weeks ago, a working version of TxK was demoed at Play Expo. Read below to see the video. It really seems to retain the aesthetic of Tempest 2000 enhanced by modern hardware and a full color range, with a touch of Space Giraffe tactics (you can kill enemies at the rim somehow at least).
I bought (and still have!) a Jaguar just for Tempest 2k. Great gameplay of the original with a trippy, addictive soundtrack!
Too bad the union of Jag owners, Tempest fans and Vita owners is likely quite small ^^
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
Makes me buy hardware, Sony's shrewdest step in over 10 years.
So they approached both Jeff Minter and his sheep Flossie?
REAL Tempest fits entirely memory locations 0x9000-FFFF, its lines are ONE pixel wide (but it's a BIG one!) and it does not have whiny buzzy switching power supply. It has a large throbbing step-down transformer and a whopping thirty-two thousand microfarad capacitor in the power supply. It has a flyback transformer feeding a CRT that bristles with actual electricity terror death.
Real Tempest machines go out with a real BANG.
What is shown is some Fisher Price low voltage plastic computing device, obviously meant for children, whose level completion screen is full of whoopy flashes and dancing bears distracting artifacts and eye candy as in, deer-meets-headlights.
The Real Tempest, when a level is complete it launches you into the middle and flies you through the tunnel, this was the COOLEST damned thing we ever saw when we first sawed it, and gets back down to business. No goofy crap.
THIS IS WHAT A REAL TEMPEST IS. IT CAN HURT YOU..
If the NSA tunes their TEMPEST receiver towards you and the signal resolves into a TEMPEST game, would they chuckle at the irony? If a bear shits in the woods and laughs because shit got on his 'bear' hands would he laugh hysterically and change brands of toiley paper?
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Tempest 2000 and Aliens vs. Predator are the games worth having a Jaguar for. Tempest 2000 being THE better game of the two. Being a Vita owner, I am completely thrilled to hear this news. The Vita has some great titles, but MORE, MORE, MORE!
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
The Atari Jaguar was awesome and stands as my all time favorite console. One of it's biggest problems was it essentially had the first GPU (in a round about way). Almost no one wanted to program those chips, citing the difficulty. Consequently, programmers wrote most of the games to run off of the 68000 chip which was originally intended only for booting the machine. The next problem was that almost none of the games were finished, but got released anyway - despite being unfinished many were still fun. Also, I won't deny that many of the few games that came out were in fact crap. But the best titles, that were finished, made the console worth having: Cybermorph, Battlemorph, Iron Soldier, Iron Soldier 2, Tempest2k, Alien versus Predator, Best Rayman implimentation and a few other awesome titles I can visualize but not remember. If you are lucky, you are one of the very few that got a copy of Battlesphere.
IMHO Battlemorpth is one of the all time greatest games ever made.
I recall there was a hardware bug that required a workaround, but I don't remember the details.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
If reading this has got you all riled up to play some Tempest, Torus Trooper is an excellent high speed, heart pounding alternative. As far as I know it only runs under Linux.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Consequently, programmers wrote most of the games to run off of the 68000 chip which was originally intended only for booting the machine.
I know there were two overall structures for Jaguar game programming: graphics and game logic on Tom and input processing on 68K, and graphics on Tom and input processing and game logic on 68K. I understand developers with Genesis, Neo Geo, Amiga, or Atari ST experience might prefer the latter. But did an emulator author really go through "most of the games" and find them to use the latter structure?
I recall there was a hardware bug that required a workaround
The big one, if I remember correctly, had something to do with Tom's instruction cache and required small methods and a far smarter linker than most PC programmers are used to.
Tempest 2000 was also released for DOS in the mid 90s. It was awesome. I'm still bitter about getting ripped off by an eBay seller a few years later when I paid for a copy that I never received.
Its not Tempest without the Oscar Vortex Spinner!!
It's worth noting you didn't have to be "one of the 5 people with an Atari Jaguar" to play the original game. High Voltage Software did a port of the game to Playstation titled Tempest X3. I even did a very tiny amount of work on that project although I don't remember if I received a formal credit or not.
I was skeptical at first, but then I realized who wrote it and ... there went a few hours of my life this weekend. After I hacked the source to read the right buttons for my dualshocks (pesky eight button limit, oh well remap 0-3 to 11-14 && debuild) it stole some neurons from a few friends. Really nice in 1920x1080 / 50" glory (I knew I got that fancy graphics card for something). Kind of like playing tempest 2000 inside of speedmine (happens to be one of my favorite xscreensavers).
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
Uhm... around 250,000 units is not 5. It's one thing to overflow what you are saying, but the numbers are about 50,000 times off!
I love what Minter did with Tempest to create Space Giraffe - Xbox 360 and later PC.
Lots of people don't get it, but that's because they haven't taken the time to understand it properly. I urge you to try it out, with the "missing manual" http://minotaurproject.co.uk/SpaceGiraffe/walkthrough.php
I'm not sure I can love a simple Tempest any more.
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