21st Century Digital Boy

So I’ve (re-)discovered a clone of my favourite shmup EVAR not too long ago and figured I should share the love. This game is EXCELLENT. WELL DONE. ACE. KILLER.

Typhoon 2001, being a clone of Tempest 2000 (that being an excellent remake of the 1981 arcade game Tempest by the similarly-excellent Jeff Minter) is about Shooting Stuff That Comes At You Really Really Fast. The game setting consists of a web of corridors floating in Bizarro Space, with starfields that form beautifully symmetric patterns and distant layers of… something. Your blaster, also known as The Claw, is stuck to the upper end of the Web, and Stuff Comes At You Really Really Fast from the other one. That is all the story this game has, and all the story it needs.

You can move around the top and shoot down the corridors of said web to prevent Stuff that’s moving up the corridors from Getting To You And Splattering Your Entrails All Over The Freaking Place. There’s a small(ish) but nasty set of enemies, a few basic standard shmup powerups, many funky colours, a kickass pumping soundtrack… and this.

You are now officially boned.

The no-contest nastiest enemy among what the game throws at you are Pulsars. Yellow, lightning-shaped things that move very quickly and will periodically turn the corridor they’re on into an Electric Path Of Certain Death. Moreover, if you don’t dispatch of the bastard quickly enough, it will reach the upper end of the Web and turn THAT into an Electric Path Of Certain Death. At least the other enemies have the courtesy of just stumbling around the rim trying to chase you down - not so the pulsars. Instant Doom.

I loved Tempest 2000 with all my heart, but was a bit disappointed about it never having received a good clone or remake - and, to be frank, this very one was confusing, completely overloaded on visuals, slow as molasses and generally barely playable at all just about a year or one and a half ago. Massive props to the author for taking it and making this brilliant little piece of freegaming out of it. Just like in Tempest 2000, the graphics manage to be trippy and colourful, but never obscuring what’s going on in the game. Particularly the game’s recreation of T2000’s “particle displays”, which constructs text messages such as scoring numbers and PULSAR WARNING! out of separate dots, is quite brilliant and helps a lot - the concept allows for nice-looking graphical displays that you can still see through, without the need for annoying and boring solid-colour transparency.

So, yeah, if you like arcadey shoot’em’ups, you want to play this. And chances are that you will love it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 2:06 and is filed under braindump, gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.