Tempest - Portables

[NinjaWarrior]

Likr the Game Boy, Game Gear, Lynx

 

Can those hardware handle it?

[rockman_x_2002]

If you mean just the classic systems from that era, my guess is the Lynx probably could handle the game decently, given its built-in scaling and rotation and all. But I would imagine the Game Boy and Game Gear would struggle at playing the game.

 

Then again, the 5200 port is quite decent.

[raindog]

There was a Tempest port to the 2600, albeit an unfinished one that kind of sucked. Pretty much anything is capable of playing it. The Game Gear certainly should be able to, and even the Game Boy ought to be able to handle a very chunky-looking port. But playing it well? I think you need a screen with a high-enough resolution to simulate the vectors nicely. A knob would really help too.

 

Looks great on my 5" 1080p phone, but I'd think even a 480p device would look nice enough if there's antialiasing. I could hook my USB knob up to it for the whole experience, but that would kind of defeat the whole portability thing -- maybe there's a way to interface my Nintendo DS paddle to it somehow, but I don't have the hardware-fu to figure it out. So I don't play Tempest much on the phone.

[Hyperboy]

The new TxK by Jeff Minter is insanely cool on the PS Vita, It's like Tempest 2000 on Jaguar but on steroids!

[BrianC]

Considering it got decent versions on Atari 5200 and Atari 8 bit computer, I think all of those systems would be able to handle it. There are already versions of the original on GBA and DS in compilations, both of which are very good.

 

I don't know about Tempest being chunky on GB. X, a game from Argonaut/Nintendo, handled vector style graphics very well.

Edited February 28, 2014 by BrianC

[raindog]

I'd never heard of X before. It's cool looking (and how strange that 25 years later they're releasing another game by the same name in a totally different genre), but most of the lines are orthogonal. In Tempest, even some of the more orthogonal levels start getting squirrelly once you reduce the resolution:

 

I know someone creating it by hand could do better than this (took the clearest Tempest screenshot I could find, inverted it, made it greyscale, scaled it down and reduced colors to 4, not sure about the order of those last two), and I hope someone will try, but there are only so many pixels on that screen.