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Posted April 11, 2013 by Zeth in News
 
 

Tempest resurrected in newly announced title TxK

tempest 2000
tempest 2000

TxK might sound a little like the active ingredient in expensive face cream but it is in fact some of the best news I’ve had in months – Tempest is back!

Jeff Minter (he of many lovely sheep and awesome beard!) wrote earlier today on his blog about the upcoming project for his company Llamasoft now that their latest title, GoatUp 2, has shipped on IOS.  Llamasoft have also embraced the donationware approach to selling some of their titles allowing people to download many of their titles for free.  You then simply put through a payment you deem suitable on the Llamasoft donationware page.

Speaking on his blog about TxK Jeff stated:

 

We’re going to base it on the essence of the original T2K. It’ll be the pure, straightforward shooter that maybe you hoped for when you first saw Space Giraffe. We’re not going to overload you with ultra psychedelia, but we will make it fluid and colourful and awesome-looking on the Vita’s delicious, vibrant OLED screen. 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.

It’s going to be *awesome* :)

 

Speaking of the last great incarnation (excluding the divisive Space Giraffe title… which I loved btw) Minter noted:

19 years ago saw the release of one of the best games Llamasoft ever made, a game which came to be recognised as one of the best games on an entire system – Tempest 2000 on the Atari Jaguar. I’ve often thought that one day I would like to revisit that game and do some kind of an updated version on modern hardware.

The game is set to release for Sony’s PS Vita system.   Minter makes mention in his writing that Sony are on a mission to reach out to independent developers.  This certainly seems to follow the current trend which has seen Sony do a full 180 and become somewhat a developers dream in recent months.  This also lends weight to the growing argument that the PS Vita is set to become the “go-to” portable device for indie developers in the coming year ahead.

No release date has been quoted, although Minter did state “Looks like we’ve got a busy summer ahead but it’s totally going to be so worth it.” so maybe we can look to a release in the back 1/3 of this year.  The game is set to strip down to the core of what made Tempest 2K such a massively successful and playable title.  I can’t wait to get my hands on TxK!


Zeth

 
Zeth is our EU ninja and Editor in Chief. He's been writing about video games since 2008 when he started on BrutalGamer. He's pretty old and has been a gamer since he played Space Invaders as a young boy in the 80's. His genre tastes lean towards platformers, point-and-click adventure, action-adventure and shooters but he'll turn his hand to anything.