GAME CLEAR No. 114 -- Tempest 4000

Tempest 4000 (2018, Multiplatform)

Developer: Llamasoft
Publisher: Atari
Clear Date: 1/21/23
Clear Platform: Xbox Series X

Well lol. In my 2022 wrap up, I said I would “probably never see all of this game’s levels,” but less than two weeks later, I’ve done it.

As I said then, it took a long time, but Jeff Minter and his Tempest iterations have finally won me over. I initially became aware of Llamasoft by way of TxK, but I bounced off of it pretty quickly. Just didn’t really get it. When I found a Tempest 4000 disc at a local used media store for just a few bucks, I decided I’d give it one more shot. It finally clicked.

Minter himself has described Tempest 2000 and some of his subsequent works as “trance shooters.” Games that are so fun or engaging that they put the player in a trance-like state. And he’s fuckin’ right! When I’m piloting that croissant on planes and polygons, shooting (heavily abstracted) space beasts, I am locked in. Add in some psychedelic visuals and bumpin’ music, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for flow.

As aforementioned, I initially appraised the game as too difficult for me to complete, but its enthralling nature kept me in a “one more stage” grind every time I played it. The result was that I was eventually able to beat all of its levels in Classic mode. The key is that in this mode, every time you reach a level with a higher score than the previous time you reached it (or a stage you’ve never reached before), the game saves that state as your “best.” The state includes the number of lives you have. So, I basically held myself to the standard of clearing each new stage with a minimum of 3 lives left. If a stage simply proved too difficult, I would do my best to recoup any lost lives in subsequent stages. This was tenable because the difficulty doesn’t just increase linearly. Usually, stages in which a new enemy type is introduced are a bit on the easy side, and the often follow the toughest stages. In these moments, racking up a couple 1-Ups is pretty doable to get back on schedule, so to speak. Overall, it’s still a challenging game, but it is designed to be finishable. It also helped that, believe it or not, I got a little better at the game the more time I spent with it!

And I will probably continue to spend time with it in its Pure and Survival Modes (which require the player to start from Stage 1). There are achievements for reaching certain stages without dying in these modes and things of that nature, which are sufficiently carrot-like for me to give them a go. I’m probably not good enough to unlock most of ’em, but I didn’t think I was good enough to beat the game at all, so who knows?

Play Tempest 4000. It’s good for you.