Game Boy Advance: Tempest - What about channel 4?

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For the final month of 2010 the Together Retro game club at http://racketboy.com decided to travel all the way back to 1980 for the arcade classic Tempest. On first look Tempest seems overly simple with it's vector graphics and small color palette. But once you start to play the game you realize that it was actually rather ahead of its time. To start with the game is a Tube Shooter in which you pilot a ship that can actually rotate 360 degrees around the outside of the tube and fire into the vanishing point from where enemies materialize. Surprisingly the vector graphics really do create an impressive 3D feel once you submerge yourself into the game, although admittedly you really have to use your imagination to make anything out of the enemy shapes. As primitive as the whole thing appears, this game is certainly one for the hardcore. It is by no means simple, and requires constant shooting and dodging. When I first started playing the game I would often see GAME OVER in under a minute. However once you put some time into learning the nuances of the gameplay things start to make a certain sense. I can only imagine the quarters that were sunk into the arcade original while attempting to make sense of Tempest.

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In 2002 Tempest was ported to the Game Boy Advance as part of the wonderful Atari Anniversary Advance compilation. The GBA version looks and sounds great, and is almost arcade-perfect in execution. Of course there's one glaring omission from the GBA release: the rotary controller. My original plan was to purchase the Vaus rotary controller that was package with the NES version of Arkenoid and use it with the NES-to-GameCube controller adapter sold by http://retrousb.com. However, after doing a bit of research it became apparent that this would not work correctly due to some complicated analog stuff that I don't even fully understand. Having said that, I did get rather good at the game using a Hori pad. I did also test out using a GameCube steering wheel as an alternative to the rotary controller. Though the steering wheel didn't offer full 360 degrees freedom, it did have a certain arcade-style feel to it.

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Though the lack of rotary control is too bad, there is an exceptionally cool feature present in the GBA port of Tempest. If you hit the Select button the screen will actually rotate to display in a landscape presentation that actually represents the aspect-ratio of the original arcade cab. Now perhaps that was just a novelty on the Game Boy Advance hardware, but if you're playing it on a Game Boy Player and using a monitor that you can actually turn on its side, then this is actually pretty amazing.

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I should also mention that although the original Tempest has lots of sound effects, it is devoid of music during gameplay. If this bothers you at all then I have an excellent solution to offer up. In 1994 Tempest was remade as Tempest 2000 on the Atari Jaguar. The game is generally considered the absolute best game in the Jaguar catalog, and high on its list of credentials is its wonderful soundtrack. The Tempest 2000 soundtrack features a great mix of stereotypically awesome 90's techno, and it's also still easily available. There's something really great about playing an 80's arcade game while listening to 90's rave music made for a shooter imagining the year 2000.

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Even after a playing for a month I can hardly say I've mastered this game. But I do think it's a lot of fun, and can see myself playing it fairly often in the near future. Though I definitely got a lot better after a month of practice 77,380 is the best I could do. But there's much to be said for the fact that I loved every moment, no matter how difficult it was.