Mildly mentioned in the Playstation Vita Play 2014 promotion, the last of the 4 games is TxK from Llamasoft.
DROP THE UDDER. WUT? Let me look around. Giant blog post by YAK from last August with a gameplay video. He describes it as a Tempest 2000 with slightly toned down visuals, and same-ish gameplay.
Suddenly I am 3.1415 time happier that I own a Vita!
(Those of you who saw my Steam avatar can understand why I’m the only one who should start this thread!)
I’ve been highly interested in TxK since it was originally announced last April, so I was glad to see the February 11 release date announced.
I’ll be watching for impressions. Haven’t played any of the games in this style, but it looks interesting, and I’m already thinking about getting Dustforce, which would make for a decent discount if buying both.
How different is this to Space Giraffe? Why didn’t they just port that to Vita?
Space Giraffe was Space Giraffe, this is Tempest. From what Minter’s said, it’s not going to have the bulling mechanic of SG. Just shoot and avoid enemies.
That’s a bit meaningless to me, as to be honest I always thought Space Giraffe WAS Tempest just with more visual noise :)
It’s similar, but the gameplay mechanics were more complex (bulling, juggling etc), which was exacerbated by the visual noise.
I hope this makes its way onto steam or PS4 one day, because I really want it play it. I played a Tempest clone a bunch on my AppleII and my college had a Tempest machine in our student lounge. I played a lot of it between classes.
Jesus, ten years later and Minter is still milking Tempest? You’d think he’d have moved on to leeching off some other retro game by now.
He has a large body of work on iOS, nine games in fact.
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/gridrunner/id502840657?mt=8
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/fiveaday/id513911574?mt=8
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/super-ox-wars/id537731380?mt=8
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/goatup-2/id604025013?mt=8
Yup, he’s moved onto milking gridrunner ;)
Uh, most of us wanted him to milk Tempest when he did Space Giraffe! Luckily, XBLA games must have a demo mode. When I played it I couldn’t figure out what to do at all. Space Giraffe != Tempest.
Space Giraffe has this mechanic where you want as many enemies to climb to the top edge on one side of your player as possible, so you can “bull” them off the edge for points. In Tempest, you don’t want anything to get on the edge with the player, because there are very few options to kill them before they physically hit and kill you.
He needs to get back to Llamatron. And maybe Defender 2000.
Yup, he’s moved onto milking gridrunner ;)
And Robotron. Minotron: 2112 is a great iOS remake of Llamatron, my favourite Minter game (other than Tempest 2000, which I only ever played at game store demo kiosks).
Time to revive my 3GS…and I’ve still got money in iTunes! The minotron control looks odd at first, but the firing control seems to make a lot of sense.
Ginger: Search for Typhon 2001. It might still be playable in Win7.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/minotron2112/id421377889
edit: Oh, Ginger pointed out Minotron: 2112 :)
And bought! Will try it tonight.
Just bought TxK. Will try later tonight, I hope…
It’s been 2 days, I should post impressions.
TxK is the true sequel to Tempest 2000 (T2k) that we (or just I) have been waiting for. Many aspect of this game feels like it had only minor improvements or tweaks from T2k, but that’s perfectly fine for those of us (or just me) who found Space Giraffe utterly foreign. For example, the powerup mechanics of collecting “pluses” that fly up the web is the same, and the progression of gifts are indentical (with 2 additions, 1 is a new powerup “maximum bullets”, the other being…bonus scores or something?). All enemies from Tempest returns with tweaks: flippers flip slower on the rim, giving players better chance to kill them; pulsars have much longer down time between pulses; fuseballs don’t seem to hang around the rim (or maybe won’t do this until much later level?). As of level 24, there seems to be only 1 new enemy that I noticed.
But there’s gotta be something new, right? There’s Vita-specific controls: tap the O button or the screen to fire the Supertapper, and tilting the vita changes the camera angle slightly. There’s a minigame in between webs now, which is like a short version of the Warp bonus level in T2k. The webs can shift and change shape…I’m expecting a level where the ends join up to turn a plane into a circle.
The graphics are much cleaner and more vector-like than T2k. The Vita’s OLED screen is just perfect for displaying the saturated coloured lines, and the trademark Minter psychedelic visuals are more subdued. This means that enemies crawling up the web are now easily identified! I made less mistake from getting zapped by pulsars now, because I can actually see them.
The music is…more techno stuff in the same vein as T2k. There are sheep bleating sounds in the game, of course.
The manual doesn’t describe any enemies, so it’s up to you/me to play the game lots to get familiar with enemy attacks and movement patterns.
Sweet. Missed your original post, so I’m glad you provided the impressions. Now I just have to charge my Vita so I can download and play it.