Game Review: Tempest (Amstrad, Ricochet)

A large part of Mastertronic’s early catalogue was made up of re-releases from other publishers or clones of popular arcade games. It wasn’t until much later in the company’s life that they started to delve into official licenses. But things finally came full circle with the advent of the Ricochet label and the release of Tempest for the Amstrad and ZX Spectrum – an official conversion of Atari’s hit arcade game and a re-release of  to-boot!

Tempest – A True Arcade Classic

If you’ve been living under a rock for the last 40+ years, Tempest is one of the most influential arcade games ever released by Atari. It’s a 3D shoot-em-up taking place over a series of tunnels, with your gun positioned at the top. Rather than having free movement, you can only move your gun left and right which moves it around the top of the tunnel in a clockwise or anti-clockwise direction. Various types of creatures (for want of a better word) are moving up the tunnel towards you and you have to destroy all of them to clear each wave and move on to the next.

While the attacking creatures don’t fire back at you, collision with any will cost one of your lives. And if you don’t stop them on the way up, they will linger around if they reach the top limiting your movement. Each tunnel has a different design and attack patterns are randomised so no two games ever play the same.

Influencing The Future

While it may not look it at first glance, it’s clear to see the impact that Tempest had on the games industry. As well as all of the clones and its own sequels (including the most recent Tempest 4000 for the Nintendo Switch, PS4 and XBox) it launched an entire genre of similar tunnel and rail shooters and it’s safe to say that the likes of Space Harrier and countless others wouldn’t exist without Atari’s classic.

Arcade Action

Tempest is quite rightly regarded as a true classic. The blend of frantic action, level variety and gradually increasing difficult all combine to make it a classic but the key question is how well does the Amstrad version (originally released by Electric Dreams before this Mastertronic re-release on their Ricochet range) manage to cope with recreating this at home? To be honest, it does remarkably well – controls are simple enough and it can be played with keyboard or joystick and either work just as well and considering the nature of the visuals it runs at an impressive speed.

But the key thing is the playability, and as a fan of the arcade original this version manages to capture the addictive gameplay extremely well. While there are some times when it can be difficult to tell just which segment the creature is coming at you from when the grids are tightly packed, this doesn’t really impact on the gameplay at all and you’ll find yourself coming back over and over for one more go.

Graphics And Sound

Recreating the visuals of Tempest on any home system was never going to be easy. The arcade machine used an innovative vector display rather than pixel based images found on other games at the time. This meant that the developer had a tough choice with this port. In the end, all of the graphics here have been created as wireframe vectors and for the most part it runs at quite a respectable speed ensuring that the arcade action is still fast enough to keep its addictive qualities. There are moments where things do slow down when the screen gets busy, but it doesn’t impact on the game too much.

Sound is impressive as well. While the title music is rather uninspring, the sound effects are superb throughout really bringing the action to life and really make effective use of the AY chip.

Overall

This really is a great port of one of the all-time greats in arcade gaming and despite a few minor quibbles the Amstrad manages to deliver a more than capable version of Tempest. With great visuals and sound, it offers an addictive shooter than no self-respecting arcade fan should be without. And if you happen to own a ZX Spectrum, this was one of Mastertronic’s dual-format “flippy” releases, so you get the Spectrum version on the other side of the tape making this an absolute steal at the price!

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