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Classic Games (Games) PlayStation (Games)

TxK, Tempest 2000 Remake for PS Vita Demoed 41

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the test-of-free-software-faith dept.
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).

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TxK, Tempest 2000 Remake for PS Vita Demoed More

TxK, Tempest 2000 Remake for PS Vita Demoed

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  • Tempest in a Teapot (Score:3)

    by GTRacer ( 234395 ) <gtracer308&yahoo,com> on Friday November 01, 2013 @10:55AM (#45300319) Homepage Journal
    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 ^^

  • So they approached both Jeff Minter and his sheep Flossie?

  • That is Fake Tempest (Score:4, Informative)

    by TheRealHocusLocus ( 2319802 ) on Friday November 01, 2013 @11:02AM (#45300417)

    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. [kfu.com].

    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?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )

      what do you mean with pixels?

      • what do you mean with pixels?

        Real Trinitron Pixels of red, green and blue writ by slap-happy vector beams that danced and played 'round the screen to actually draw the thing just as you would. Using angles 'n stuff.

        Pac Mans and other computer mens and wimmins make the poor beams trace out this dreary left to right up and down on but mostly offey and horizonta-blinkey thing where the beam travels a mile and a half just to say "GAME OVER" in the middle.

        In a Real Tempest the beams do not travel a thousand miles. They draw what needs to b

    • 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.

      As I remember "Real Tempest" it was a vector-graphic display. And it had a real spinny knob. I sure liked the spinny knob better than the thumbpad thing on the Jaguar that I tolerated solely for Tempest 2k. The Jag did have great graphics and sound -- at least for its time. Mine's long since been sold off, so hard to say exactly how it would look and sound compared with current hardware, which I also don't have . . .

    • I'm trying to get off his lawn as fast as I can!!!!

    • You have no idea who Jeff Minter is, do you?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by andrewa ( 18630 )
        The first game I ever bought with my own pocket money was Gridrunner on the Vic 20. Been following his career ever since, he's truly a unique guy in this industry. There's just one thing.... that BASIC listing of ROX 64 in C&VG back in... 1984? I never could get that to run. Damn.

    • If the NSA tunes their TEMPEST receiver towards you and the signal resolves into a TEMPEST game, would they chuckle at the irony?

      Thinking about that statement just made my brain pop. The statement is even funner than it seems! Due to the lack of horizontal and vertical trace with synchronizing blanking intervals, the Real Tempest would have probably thwarted a standard Van Eck Phreaky NSA TEMPEST device [slashdot.org].

      You could say Real Tempest used a form of visual encryption.

      It's a fresh angle of looking at it, a matter of a pinion, this "What's our vector, Victor?" versus raster, frigid polar coordinates failing to pinpoint warm Cartesian wells,

  • 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!

  • Laugh all you want about the Jaguar (Score:3)

    by wjcofkc ( 964165 ) on Friday November 01, 2013 @11:14AM (#45300519)
    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.

    • 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 met

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by wjcofkc ( 964165 )
        This is a blurb from the Wikipedia article:

        Design specs for the console allude to the GPU or DSP being capable of acting as a CPU, leaving the Motorola 68000 to read controller inputs. In practice, however, many developers used the Motorola 68000 to drive gameplay logic.

        I guess I wasn't quite right, what can I say, it's been a couple of decades : )

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by adisakp ( 705706 )
        The fast co-processors (Tom and Jerry) didn't have instruction caches (as you would think of them today anyhow). They did have a small amount (4K) of directly mapped local memory. They were originally designed to run programs either in this memory or in normal memory. However, due to bugs in the chip, you could only reliably run code from the 4K internal memory. Since this was directly mapped, that meant all your code had to run in 4K. If you wanted to run larger programs, you needed a small amount of
    • Cybermorph

      Where did YOU learn to fly?
      Where did YOU learn to fly?
      Where did YOU learn to fly?
      Where did YOU learn to fly?
      Where did YOU learn to fly?
  • 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.

    • Looks like it would be a fun game. Do you know if anyone is maintaining it for current Linux systems? I found this [sourceforge.net], but it is from 2005 and both the D language and OpenGL have evolved quite a bit since then. I was hoping to play it on a GL ES device (GCW Zero).

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • 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 [sourceforge.net] (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 [kfish.org] (happens to be one of my favorite xscreensavers).

  • 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 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 [minotaurproject.co.uk]

    I'm not sure I can love a simple Tempest any more.

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