 Tempest
Minimalist, abstract, Tempest is a true work of art. At the time of its release in 1980, its 'Quadrascan' colour vector graphics were groundbreaking, and even today they retain their haunting sense of unreality whilst most of Tempest's contemporaries seem laughably primitive. Tempest's gameplay is both familiar and innovative. Various 'tubes' hang in an infinite void, their rims patrolled by a strange claw-like craft. From the depths of these tubes rise geometric enemies, and they must be destroyed before they reach the rim. After defeating all of the enemies on a tube, the player 'warps' to the next one. Legend has it that Tempest began life as a first-person version of Space Invaders, but gameplay problems forced a rethink. In true surrealist fashion, the answer came to designer Dave Theurer in a dream where monsters poured forth from a hole in the ground. In a time when 3D games were rare, Tempest looked like it had materialised from another dimension. Tempest had two other innovations up its extradimensional sleeve. Firstly, there were 16 distinct tube shapes to be beaten. After that, the shapes repeated but in a different colour and with different enemies. Up until then, most games had levels that were near-indistinguishable from each other. The challenge changed from 'How high can you score?' to 'How far can you get?'.
The second innovation was not so welcome. It was the 'continue' - the feature that ultimately destroyed arcade shoot-em-ups in the late 80's & early 90's. After finishing a game of Tempest, the player had a short period of time in which to start a new game. If he was quick enough, he could start on a level close to the one he had finished on, pocketing a huge bonus score as a reward. This meant that someone prepared to shovel money into the machine could soon amass an enormous score, almost regardless of skill. And of course, there were plenty of people eager to augment their limited skills with cash. Arcade game manufacturers soon caught on, designing games that were harder and harder to play, eventually leading to such unplayable monstrosities as Gradius III. Not surprisingly, people lost interest in these over-hard games and the shoot-em-up all but disappeared from the arcades. However, it would be wrong to blame Tempest for the short-sightedness of later years. For now, we should just admire its purity. Controls Your 'craft' (variously known as the 'Claw', 'Blaster', 'Shooter', 'Zapper' or 'Yellow Thing') is moved by a rather nice spinner. The first fire button activates your rapid-fire death weaponry whilst the second unleashes the 'superzapper' - a wave of energy that fries anything on the grid. The superzapper can be used twice per level, however the second shot is only powerful enough to kill one enemy.
Variants Tempest exists in 3 revisions - rev 1 contained the infamous 'cheat' bug, rev 2 removed it and rev 3 fixed a 'screen-collapsing' bug in 2 player mode. There is also Duncan Brown's Tempest Tubes, a set of DIY new levels created in 1982. Of course, now everyone can create new levels by using TempEd. Emulation As usual, MAME emulates Tempest quite nicely. The various vector flicker and beam-width options are nice as well. Retrocade also emulates Tempest, but I have never got this program to run on my system. The version of Tempest contained in Hasbro's "Atari Arcade Hits" is a reasonable quality emulation, but the random number generation seems suspect. You do get a nice screensaver version, however. |
