Sunday Funday Tackles the Tempest - News

by VGChartz Staff , posted on 29 August 2010 / 3,984 Views

Hello and welcome back to Sunday Funday, our weekly freeware showcase and competition. We've been on a platformer kick for a few weeks, with ACTION TURNIP!!!, Hunted Forever, and Tasha's Game all delivering completely different flavors of the platforming genre. So to mix it up this week, we'll be traveling back to 1980, when Atari released what is arguably the most hardcore shooter ever created. This game is known for being the first game to ever have a selectable difficulty level, which Atari called "SkillStep." However, this didn't give you the ability to turn the difficulty down, like so many games do these days. Instead, SkillStep was devised to allow the more hardcore players to crank things up a notch by skipping to the later, much more difficult stages. This game is Tempest.

"There is a new dimension beyond the boundaries of imagination..."

And if that artwork isn't hardcore enough for you, brace yourself for a look at this intense maintenance manual.

Tempest was designed by Dave Theurer, the same guy behind Missile Command, and was originally intended to be a first-person version of Space Invaders. Theurer says it didn't work out too well, so he went with his backup idea: a game based on his recent nightmare about monsters crawling out of a hole in the Earth. So basically, if you grabbed the screen of Space Invaders, magically ripped it out of the arcade cabinet, wrapped it into a tube, pointed it at a hole in the Earth, sped it up, and made it into a nightmare, you'd have a game that's almost as hard as Tempest.

(The vector-based graphics also make for some delicious time-lapse photography.)

The controls are simple. With your keyboard, left and right move your ship along the edges of the playfield, and in the case of tube levels, you can go all the way around. Up will fire your regular gun, and down will fire your Superzapper. You can Superzap once per level, and it will destroy everything on the screen. Timing your Superzaps well can help you rack up a great deal of points, but you don't want to waste them on the harder levels. You can also move your ship around with your mouse if you like.

That's pretty much all you need to know. The gameplay is fast and fierce though, so you'll probably need to give it a few tries to see if you can get in the zone and rack up a nice high score. On the other hand, since a single playthrough probably won't last very long, if somebody else takes the top spot, it'll only take you a minute to take it back... if you can.

Since Tempest is so horribly difficult, I'll be including the seven tips from Atari's own website:

1) Players should work their way up through the levels to become familiar with the game play. Drop down a level if play is too difficult.
2) Experienced players should start at the highest level possible for maximum points.
3) On a new Playfield shoot at enemy dots at far rim.
4) Shoot the flipper at the top as soon as it starts to flip.
5) Use long spikes to reclaim shots and kill enemies (at the top) approaching you from adjacent lanes.
6) Avoid shooting fuseball-tankers near the top since emerging fuseballs usually zip up to the top and kill you.
7) Use Superzap right before the last enemy reaches the top for a few extra points.

To compete with the rest of us this week, just submit any photo or screengrab of your high score. You can upload your pictures anywhere, like flickr, ImageShack, or Photobucket, and link to them in the comments. The winner will be announced in next week's Sunday Funday, and immortalized forever on the internet. If you don't have an account yet, just click here to create one!

Last week's winner, and our new High Score Hero, is Quibber123, who found 19 of the 28 pointless unlockables in Tasha's Game. Congratulations Quibber123! You are now our official HSH for a whole week. Use your power and fame wisely. Everybody else, it's time to tackle the Tempest. But be careful out there; some of us might not make it out alive.

Good luck folks!

Tempest