Game Review: Tempest (ZX Spectrum, Ricochet)

As someone who grew up in the 70s, visiting arcades was a highlight of every family holiday. I was fortunate enough to be around when the likes of Space Invaders and Pac Man were first released so arcade clones were the games I was drawn to more than anything whether it was from Mastertronic or any other publisher. There was nothing better – or so we thought – than seeing official conversions of arcade games though, and after playing the Amstrad version I had high hopes for this Spectrum port of Atari’s classic Tempest…

Tempest – One Of The All Time Greats

If you’ve been living under a rock for over 40 years, Tempest is one of Atari’s most influential arcade games. It’s a 3D rail shooter taking place over a series of tunnels, with your gun positioned at the top. Rather than having free movement, you can only move your turret 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 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.

Graphics And Sound

David Pridmore had a tough job ahead of him when it came to recreating the innovative visuals of Tempest for the Spectrum. The arcade’s vector display was unique and but rather that trying to adapt the game to using character based graphics, everything has been replicated as wireframe 3D vectors. Truthfully it works very well here on the Spectrum and runs at quite an impressive speed ensuring that the arcade action is still fast enough to keep its addictive qualities.

The only real downside is that all of the stages are single colour – for the grid and all of the enemy craft, bullets and your ship making it difficult to distinguish between everything at times. I appreciate that this was done to avoid colour clash issues (which may have also slowed the game down) but this would have been forgiveable to make things easier to see on screen.

As a game written to run on a standard 48k Spectrum, sound is limited to a few clicks and bleeps as you move around the tunnel, shoot and destroy everything on the playfield. There are no enhancements for 128k systems so there’s no music either.

Arcade Action

Tempest is quite rightly regarded as a true classic and influenced the entire games industry. If it wasn’t for tunnel shooters, the genre wouldn’t have evolved to see the likes of Space Harrier, Afterburner and even light gun games like Time Crisis and so on. But back to Tempest and the mix of non-stop action, variety in level design and balanced difficulty curve combine perfectly to make the game an all-tume classic.

But how does it hold up when translated to the Spectrum? Originally released by Electric Dreams and then re-released by Mastertronic on the Ricochet label, this version holds up remarkably well. Controls are simple enough using Q and E to move your ship left and right, Enter to fire and Z to fire the Superzapper (Tempest’s equivalent of a smart bomb). While there’s no joystick option, it doesn’t really need it.

Considering the nature of the arcade visuals it runs at an impressive speed, but the most important thing about Tempest is its playability. As a fan of the arcade original this version manages to capture the addictive gameplay extremely well. The only real gripes I had when it came to the gameplay were side effects caused by the graphics. At times the monochrome visuals made it hard to see where things were coming from, and when the grids were tightly packed this also made it hard to tell just which segment creatures were. But none of this really affects the gameplay itself, and you’ll find yourself coming back to play this over and over again.

Overall

This really is a great port of one of the all-time greats in arcade gaming and despite the issue I had with the clarity of the graphics at times, it delivers a solid playable version of Tempest. It’s an addictive shooter that no self-respecting arcade fan should be without and as an added bonus it comes complete with the Amstrad version on the reverse side of the tape being one of Mastertronic’s dual-format “flippy” releases!

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