In 1994, Jeff Minter shipped Tempest 2000 for Atari Jaguar and came as close as possible to making the crummy old console worth buying. Unlike the Jag, there are a dozen good reasons to own a PS Vita already – and 27 years after Tempest 2000, Minter's follow-up with TxK might be the best.
If you want to delve into the history books, TxK, like Tempest 2000, is a remake of Dave Theurer's 1980 arcade shooter (Theurer also created the brilliant Missile Command for Atari) – with the original's black and white vectors replaced by all the colors in the world. Like Tempest, enemies appear at the end of the TxK's webs and crawl their way towards your ship on the upper rim while you return fire and hold off the advancing horde – which is where the similarities end. Minter has dragged Tempest into the 21st century, stopping to grab a handful of techno tracks with a soundtrack that's all-new work by fans of the original game and brought the systems behind it entirely up to date.
Every enemy has a job – some trying to drag you down the web, some filling it with hazards to trap you when you exit the level, and others just narrowing down how much of the rim you can use. Your priorities constantly shift, from nothing more complicated than survival to experimenting with the enemies' behaviors and developing strategies, to high-score chasing as the game becomes more familiar and the all-out sensory assault is assimilated. And you will incorporate it, no matter how dazzling TxK is at first. As time slows and TxK captures every second of your attention in a way that few games can, the hammering beats and blasts of color that used to strike you square in the head fade into the background.
The Atari Jaguar was the best gaming hardware around when it was released. However, Atari was very, very cheap when it came to game development and third party support and recruitment. They spent as little as possible on the games they developed, ensuring substandard software for the most part.