4. Tempest (Arcade)

By YAK

My love affair with Tempest started unexpectedly on a rainy day in London. Up in town with my parents, I'd split from them, agreeing to meet up later, and while I was walking down Shaftesbury Avenue it started to rain, and I ducked into a darkened arcade to be confronted by a Tempest machine. The neon web glowing in the darkness, in colour vector clarity and purity, was enough to grab my attention. I dropped in my 10p, rated myself as novice, and felt for the first time the wonderful, tactile interface of the spinny controller.

When I cleared the first web and zoomed through star-filled space to land gently at the edge of the next level, I think then I knew it would be love. I had no idea back then just what a strange journey that love would take me on, nor that more than 20 years later I'd find myself once again standing transfixed in front of the glowing webs, in love all over again.

Much has been written about Tempest's sparse beauty, and indeed all one has to do is look at the game to appreciate that. But Tempest is beautiful on many levels other than simply graphical. It’s a consummate example of the skill exhibited by the very best game designers of the classic age.

The game's design is eloquent – nothing is wasted or unnecessary. Just a handful of K of code and a very limited graphical subsystem were all that the designer had to work with; there could be no tarting-up of a mediocre game with lavish graphics and sound in those days. *Everything* is significant, everything must be watched, analysed and taken into account if one is to survive the game's fierce challenge: the cadence of your shots; the topography of the Web; the swarm of dots representing enemies yet to land; the type and position of enemies already upon the Web... You must think fast and respond quickly and accurately. You must also learn to adapt as the game progresses - factors which helped you in the early levels can become deadly as you play further, as new enemy types emerge and their behaviours change the characteristics of the battleground. Tempest can even kill you when you think you’ve won and are already on your way to the next level.

All that design cleverness is entirely transparent to the player, who simply experiences a beautifully well-balanced, challenging and satisfying shoot-‘em-up experience. The concept is easy to understand immediately, and the controls are simple but provide an interface to the game that is exactly sufficient to respond to the challenge that it offers. It also one of the best-feeling control methods of all time. The flywheel controller gives a tactile feedback and subtlety of response that makes the on-screen claw feel and respond like something real rather than just a sprite on a screen.

Even when you die, Tempest's ‘skill-step’ allows you to fight to maintain your progress - provided you do so within one attract cycle; a strategy which kept players at the machine for "just one more go" very effectively in the arcade, and makes it a very good home game too - you can either try to get as far as you can in one go, or play until you lose your skill-step, which tends to yield a longer game session.

Tempest is indeed a thing of beauty on many levels - graphically lovely with its glowing vectors, pleasing to the eye of a game designer with its beautifully well-balanced and well-thought-out gameplay, but best of all, it’s wonderful for the player to immerse himself in, preferably in a dark room with some banging tunes on and the sound effects turned up loud. Simple to learn, difficult to master, and addictive as Hell - all the marks of a classic.

YAK

And in reverse order...

50 to 40 - Oooh the suspense.
39 to 29 - Wow, if only we had Paul Ross to present.
28 to 18 - Time for a cup of tea in the break?
17 to 6 - Nearly there, so you get just a bit more meat.
5 - Into the legends...
4 - Is this the Bobby Moore to no.1's Paul Gascoigne?
3 - 3-2-1 quipped Ted Rogers. He wasn't wrong.
2 - We argued and agonised for months over this list - we really did.
1 - But of the number one slot, there was never any doubt.

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