This is the easiest review I will ever have to write. Remember TxK on PlayStation Vita? Tempest 4000 is that, but with prettier graphics in 4K. I should probably write a little more than that for those of you who missed TxK, so here’s the skinny. Tempest 4000 is an official sequel to Tempest 2000, both of which were created by legendary coder Jeff Minter. The game is pure arcade action and finds you piloting the Claw, a simple vector ship that hugs the nearest side of tubes and surfaces that stretch out in to a black void. The play areas are divided into lanes, with enemies spawning in the distance and heading up the lanes before attempting to capture you when the reach your end, or shoot you with firey laser death. – ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW – You start each level with your basic laser and killing enemies releases power ups that include more bullets, different lasers, and the two most useful power ups, a jump and an AI bot. The jump means you can spring off the edge of the level and avoid enemies who have reached your end, whilst the AI bot happily zips about killing the enemies for you, allowing you to concentrate on a smaller section of the play area and stay relatively safe. If you do get grabbed by one of the enemies it will drag you down the screen, but you do have one smart bomb per level which can be fired off to save you from your demise. When you do eventually run out lives you can start on any previous level, of which there are one hundred, but will begin with the same amount of lives as when you previously completed it. This means that if you do run in to a harder level you can step back a few levels and work your way back up, hopefully retaining more lives to see you through. After the first few levels you are going to need laser sharp reflexes and a keen eye to keep track of the enemies, but if you can manage that Tempest 4000 is a great challenge. New enemies are gradually introduced and the level designs get more complicated as you progress, looping round each other or bending and folding as you play. It’s a single minded game, but has that essential “one more go” factor, even though your progress has a lot to do with luck; if you don’t get the Jump or AI power-up within the first thirty seconds of a level you are in a lot of trouble. It is simple, pure, arcade fun. There are three different game modes Classic, Pure, and Survival, the latter giving you a load of lives but no restarts, and online leaderboards. Between levels you get to guide a spark through a series of hexagons that zoom out of the screen at you, which uses the tilt controls on the DualShock 4 on PlayStation 4. Flying through the centre of these gets you big points. The added power of the PS4 has allowed Minter to add zooming backgrounds, higher polygon enemies, and go mad with effects, but unfortunately these detract rather than add to the gameplay. In frantic battles the screen is a mess of enemies shattering into huge showers of petals, turning the play area into a blurry mess and making it extremely difficult to work out where the Claw is. I must also mention the price. $29.99 is rather steep for a game which is, bar the odd graphical tweak, practically identical to a four year old $9.99 PlayStation Vita game. What’s Good: Pure arcade action Thumping ’90s techno soundtrack Addictive ‘one more go’ gameplay What’s Bad: Overuse of screen effects Nothing new if you played TxK I have spent countless hours playing TxK on Vita and it’s one of my favourite games, so I’m disappointed that Tempest 4000 doesn’t really add anything new, especially considering the higher price. It’s still a great game and hopefully a patch will tone down the overzealous use of effects. This is worth a look if you are bored of cut scenes, collectables, and other frippery that clog up video games and want some serious old school arcade action. Score: 7/10 Version Tested: PS4 – also available on Xbox One and PC<doc-sep>Due to being born in the early 90s, I, unfortunately, was a little too young to even know what an Atari Jaguar was, let alone play its saving grace of a title, Tempest 2000. A title that in itself was a direct follow up to Atari’s 1981 arcade game, simply titled Tempest. Tempest 4000, a sequel developed by Llamsoft, the original team behind the Jaguar classic has come to modern platforms, almost 25 years after the release of Tempest 2000. As a fan of the shoot ’em up and rhythm genres, who never played any of the other Tempest titles, Tempest 4000 was an interesting experience, to say the least. Tempest 4000, from what I could tell, doesn’t seem that much different from its predecessors, with the main objective tasking players with guiding their ship through unique grid-like tubes, in which the player basically rims the outer parameters, while making sure to clear out any enemies that make it too close. Tempest 4000’s unique selling point is the way the player interacts with the stages and enemies, as mentioned prior, the player is essentially glued to a fixed portion of the grid or level layout and instead of being able to move in 3D space, the player instead has to circumnavigate the outermost parameters, while shooting inwards at targets that slowly encroach the Claw or ship. This is easier said than done, especially when stage layouts are segmented or non-looping, meaning players will have to move from side to side, rather than holding the stick or directional buttons in one direction, something that is only possible during looped or enclosed spaces. The difficulty ramps up (pun intended) as players progress through the stages, not just due to the introduction of more targets but rather, objects such as explosive stars, flowers, stems and crates filled with enemies, all of which add to the already visually noisy and borderline, overwhelming game. Tempest 4000 features neon-soaked vector-based graphics, very much reminiscent of the 80s and 90s, amped up to modern day standards that look especially striking on PlayStation 4 Pro, in which the title is presented in 4k (a nice touch, considering the very title of the game). Of course, as is true for any good shoot-em-up, power-ups are something that augments and helps curb the difficulty and Tempest 4000 is no exception. Power-ups can be earned by collecting enough green crosses, which generally spawn in small rows, that need to be quickly flown through. collecting enough powerups will transform the standard peashooter into a much more adept, particle laser, that not only has a stronger punch but also a faster rate of fire, making it easier to get out of tight situations. Other items include 1UPs, point multipliers, an AI-controlled droid that helps you clear enemies and finally, the ability to jump — jumping prevents players from earning points from kills, however, grants them the ability to briefly go backwards, escaping the clutches of the enemy. Clearing a stage or segment (in a brilliant dispersion effect, that would make the likes of Thanos blush), puts players in a short bonus sequence, in which extra points can be earned by ensuring the ship or Claw is in the centre of several oncoming rings or hoops. This portion of the game is controlled via the Dualshock 4’s gyro, which for the most part, I found to be fairly accurate. Completing a bonus section replenishes the Claw’s special attack, a screen-wiping bomb, known as the Superzapper, which basically acts as the players’ Get out of Jail free card. By far, the music is the strongest aspect of Tempest 4000, featuring synth-heavy beats that perfectly goes with the strong visuals of the game, ultimately helping immerse players better during each session. From what I could tell, Tempest 4000 features both classic tracks from previous games, as well as brand new tunes that help balance things out. Sadly, the bare bones nature of Tempest 4000 and the game modes included is the weakness that stuck with me the most as I worked through the game. Main modes of play, include a classic, pure and survival mode. Classic, let’s player start the game from the first level, whereas pure and survival allows players to pick a level and go from there, or simply survive as long as possible. In essence, none of the modes feel particularly different from one another, with the primary goal boiling down to endurance — ultimately, making the overall package feel a little flat, despite the core game having such a unique and creative approach in its design and gameplay execution. Some nice additions, that would have been a welcome touch, would be things such as the ability to change up the graphics, as in the sprites themselves (akin to titles such as Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 ) and perhaps even, a VR or 3D mode, which I find would truly help elevate a title such as this from simply being a true-to arcade feeling game to something that fully utilized the advantages of modern hardware, specifically the PSVR in regards to the PlayStation 4 iteration. Tempest 4000 is a game meant for arcade purists looking for the next evolution of a classic 80s era shoot-em-up title. The core experience is a fun and frantic miasma of explosive colours, bullets and polygonal invaders, that thanks to a easy to learn but tough to master feel, will have players coming back for more, without the worry of running out of quarters. As it stands, Tempest 4000 is a unique and challenging mashup between the rhythm game and shoot-em-up genre and worthy of the legendary Tempest title. Liked this article and want to read more like it? Check out the article on Whether the Overwatch League Can Survive Expansion and our Interview with Overwatch Voice Actress Lucie Pohl. Want to see more videos? Subscribe to our YouTube channel and check out the First 15: Fe, Monster Hunter World Beta: the Insatiable Nergigante, Dissidia Final Fantasy NT, Star Wars Battlefront II, Sonic Forces + Episode Shadow, and Super Mario Odyssey! Don’t forget to tune in every Friday the Pixels & Ink Podcast to hear the latest news, previews, and in-depth game discussions! Never miss when new CGM articles go out by following us on Twitter and Facebook! CGMagazine is Canada’s premiere comics and gaming magazine. Subscribe today to get the best of CGM delivered right to your door!<doc-sep>Elevate your enterprise data technology and strategy at Transform 2021. British indie developer Jeff Minter became a legend after coding the Atari Jaguar game Tempest 2000, transforming Dave Theurer’s 3D wireframe shooter into a cartridge-based rave. Trippy visuals, an incredible electronica soundtrack, and addictive gameplay made the sequel more memorable than its inspiration. Tempest 4000 is the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Steam PC version of Tempest 2000, or more accurately, of the spiritual sequel TxK that Minter’s company Llamasoft released while Atari was temporarily defunct. In addition to updating TxK’s graphics, including 4K resolution support, it includes three full soundtracks’ worth of Tempest 2000 and TxK music. As a huge fan of the Tempest series, I’d love to tell you that the Xbox One version I’m reviewing today is great, but it’s firmly in the “good” category due to some rough UI and UX edges. My hope is that a postrelease patch addresses its issues, as a few tweaks would make Tempest 4000 much easier to recommend to more people. What you’ll like A fun and challenging game Putting its aesthetics aside, the core game inside Tempest 4000 is still Tempest — a “tunnel shooter” where your Claw spaceship shoots enemies as they advance from the distant background of a wireframe “web” to the foreground. You move left or right on the web’s edge, firing inwards to take out targets as you enhance your abilities with powerups. For instance, a single-use Superzapper kills all on-screen enemies, weapon upgrades multiply your bullets, an AI droid clears enemies at its own pace, and a jump upgrade lets you temporarily vault off the web. Each of the 100 levels offers a different web shape — some static, some rotating or folding in on themselves — and enemies typically become more resilient and/or numerous with each passing level. You needn’t restart at level 1 when you run out of lives; you can start a new game from any stage you’ve reached. However, you will likely start from your last stage with zero extra lives, so if you get hit once, the game ends. This is a fair compromise to let players keep progressing, but around a third of the way through the game, it will be hard to advance through some levels without a spare life. Consequently, you’ll find yourself revisiting stages over and over again, sometimes having fun, other times dealing with profound frustration — especially as webs start to spin around, making your Claw difficult to precisely control. An even more detailed take on Tempest Beyond his crack coding skills, Minter is known for two things: his love of livestock (reflected in Llamasoft’s name), and his extraordinary talent as a lightshow creator. Tempest 4000 uses the 1080p and 4K resolutions of modern TVs to sharpen the edges of Tempest’s classic vector objects, but the game’s signature feature is its intentionally overwhelming special effects engine. Inspired by 1990s rave culture, Tempest 2000 was packed with pixel-exploding text, melting effects, and thumping beats. While the exploding text is toned down, Tempest 4000 amps up overlapping visual echoes, shattering polygons, and wavy distortion effects. By design, the game attempts to induce a trance-like state in players, so when it’s all just too much to look at, that’s the point. It looks much better in motion than in still images. One thing that’s regrettably missing from Tempest 4000 is a camera toggle. In Tempest 2000, players can switch between default, locked, and close up cameras that improve your perspective on various levels, but in Tempest 4000, you’re stuck at one angle that can make it hard to see some objects in the distance. Additionally, many of the webs only fill the center of a 16:9 screen, leaving background patterns to occupy the otherwise black space. If there’s a postrelease patch, a Tempest 2000-style camera option to fill more of the screen with webs and lock certain webs in one position would be one of my top three requests. Bonus stages Several bonus stages break up the shooting action. After each web, you get extra points for steering a spark-like version of your ship through the center of a light tunnel towards the next level. Originating in TxK, this is a simple addition to the Tempest formula, and initially confusing because the spark is too small on screen, but it keeps you occupied between levels. The game is better for its inclusion. Carried over from Tempest 2000 are first-person Warp bonus stages where you fly through areas filled with repeating patterns, steering your way through floating markers that increase your speed. Previously, the visuals mostly looked like melting 2D surfaces, but in Tempest 4000, the stages include more complex polygonal objects and distortion effects. The Warp bonus stages look very cool, but their “keep flying straight with minor adjustments” gameplay serves as a reminder that Tempest 4000 hasn’t evolved much beyond its predecessors apart from graphics. These are the same concepts found in Tempest 2000, only with fancier wallpaper. And despite the “4000” name, one gets the sense that the assets weren’t wholly rethought for modern 4K TVs. The navigational UI elements are consistently at least a little too small for no good reason, so you’ll squint to make them out against the rest of the art. By the time you reach these stages, however, your eyes and brain might be too melted to notice. What you won’t like Limited options and Xbox glitches Tempest 4000 officially missed its first release date, but actually hit the online PlayStation Store back in March for a very brief period of time. I know this because I excitedly bought the PlayStation 4 release, only to see it disappear from the Store for over three months. As a result, I’ve seen Tempest 4000 in both PS4 version 1.02 and Xbox One version 1.22x. The game seemed basically done in March, but the UI was surprisingly threadbare, so I hoped it would improve. Instead, it barely changed — “Options” only lets you toggle volume levels and languages — and the Xbox version I tested has minor visual glitches. In an early level, I’ve seen the right side of the Xbox screen briefly fill with a disappearing box, an issue I’ve never seen on the PS4 version. The Xbox game also has an unusual initialization period after it’s loaded. Apart from cleaning up the Xbox issues, my second patch request for this title would be additional visual, music, and control options. For now, the game delivers TxK’s basic visual experience at a much higher resolution, which is nice. But giving players the ability to choose the speed of the Claw’s movement would help. And it would be great to have at least a little control over the backgrounds, or see them moving in sync with the music — something that Minter’s Virtual Light Machine for Jaguar proved was possible. I’m not holding my breath for the latter changes to happen, but they would take Tempest 4000 from “good” to “amazing.” Weird music situation On a positive note, Tempest 4000 has three impressive soundtracks to choose from — the Jaguar’s brilliant original Tempest 2000 chip music, enhanced CD-quality mixes of the same soundtrack, and completely different tracks from TxK. While the newer TxK tracks never reach the unparalleled heights of Tempest 2000’s most remarkable songs, it’s great that you can choose between multiple playlists. But it’s not great that Tempest 4000 omits even basic audio playback controls. I thought it was weird when version 1.02 of the game never flagged that you can switch between the three soundtracks by pressing the Triangle (PS4) or Y (Xbox) button at the Level Select menu, but version 1.22 doesn’t mention that detail, either. Moreover, there’s no track selection feature, so you’re stuck listening to a single song for around eight webs. The promise of a new song might be an incentive to complete multiple stages, but with such a huge soundtrack to explore — and so much need to replay certain frustrating stages — it would be better to let players have more control than a volume slider. No VR support, but plenty of obscure text references<doc-sep>
Tempest 4000 Review: Tube Trippin' This neon-soaked shooter is an adrenaline rush worth witnessing. Our review. If you're a PS Vita enthusiast, you likely no doubt remember the trippy, excellent shooter from Llamasoft and Jeff Minter known as TxK. Minter was originally responsible for bringing us remakes of the classic arcade game Tempest, and TxK was one of the coolest tube shooters to evoke the same feeling that cult favorite did years ago. Though he was hit with several legal threats and cease and desist orders that ended up blocking TxK's release outside of PS Vita, Minter wasn't deterred. He went on to create Tempest 4000, a new entry in the Tempest series that's actually published by Atari, SA. The cool part? It's basically TxK, one more time. No one would ever complain about that, given the fact that it's one of the best-looking tube shooters out there. And while it's a bit frustrating to control, and not entirely perfect, it still a colorful and zany riff on one of history's greatest arcade games. Feed Your Head to the Web If you've never played Tempest before, the premise is quite simple. In a burst of pure, unadulterated arcade action, you take on the Herculean task of piloting the Claw. In a world of bright and colorful vector graphics, you fly out into the sea of black stretching out before you, sticking closely to a tube through which enemies hurtle toward you. acc level begins with rudimentary weapons, until you progress enough to procure power-ups and other goodies to deal out some massive damage. If you miss an enemy, you run the risk of being dragged down the tube to your demise. You definitely don't want that to happen, of course, because you only have a set amount of lives per level to work with. When they're all gone, it's game over. The more enemies you kill, the better items you'll rack up as you make your way through a level. That includes a variety of different bullet types, lasers, and the AI bot as well as the ever-useful jump. The jump power-up lets you literally jump off the edge of the "tube" area to avoid the enemies that have advanced so far toward you that there's nowhere for you to go to escape them. The goal is to of course kill off anything that even attempts to get this close, but if you find yourself in that type of bind, you've gotta find some way out, after all. That's why the jump is so useful. The AI bot is a boon as well, because it'll kill off the enemies you simply can't get to. If for some reason an enemy still drags you away, you can detonate a bomb to get you out of that sticky situation soon enough. Unfortunately, you'll find yourself in some of these precarious fixes quite often, since there are a few niggles with the game that need worked out. Eat Electric Death Given that the game is all about navigating the tube and blasting enemies, that one mechanics needs to work exceedingly well. Unfortunately, the controls leave something to be desired. It's not as responsive as I'd like when zooming around the tube, and it can be a bit unwieldy at times to simply move about the tube. It can take some getting used to, at the very least. I also found that the motion control-based in between levels, where you can guide your avatar through a series of hexagonal shapes, was difficult to control as well. You utilize your DualShock 4's motion controls to accomplish this, and it wasn't as polished as it could have been. I found myself saying that about several things while playing, all related to the control scheme, which is unfortunate since almost every other aspect of the game felt just right. Pure Survival Classic If you can get past the control issues, however, you'll find a lot to love here. Tempest 4000's Classic, Pure, and Survival modes offer new ways to play, depending on what you're in the mood for. The stark black background characterizing the abyss from which enemies fly in from, as well as the frantic gameplay and blooms of random colors are well worth experiencing, even though the game can be frustrating at times.