The feature I recall being most-lauded, aside from the hypnotic, scintillating gameplay of Tempest 2000, was the techno soundtrack. I didn't hear it until yesterday, and while I can see how it would have packed dancefloors — or at least a living room — a decade go, I wasn't grabbed as much as I'd hoped to be. Nevertheless, I was tugged into the romping association that comes with following one hyperlink after another, and ended up on the Wikipedia entry for Tempest 3000. Seems to have received little fanfare compared to its Jaguar's flagship brethren, but then, at the bottom of the page: tsunami 2010.

 

… what we are dealing with here are far greater forces.

Let's start with the filesize: tsunami 2010 is an inscrutably small game, packed into 96K — that's KILOBYTES — of hard drive space. In other words, on most modern broadband, it'll download in a second or two. In an age where many games span the hundreds-of-megs, if not the "Hey, let's stuff more than a single DVD!" gamut, this compact form is refreshingly trim, and irrevocably harks back to… simpler times.

Second, and perhaps this should've been first, tsunami 2010 is freeware and you can download it by clicking this very link. Unzip and double-click. You'll notice on the official page, there are some bonus packs of MOD music. If you remember booting up tracker programs on an Amiga, then the clipped, oddly repitched, make-the-most-out-of-few-samples ethos will glide into your head like an eagle swoops in for its prey. Those packs are optional — if you play tsunami 2010 without them, you'll be treated to hauntingly floating chiptunesque music, crisp, raw, and aliased.

Let me just say this is one of the most incredible game finds I have ever come across. Yes, it shames me I haven't heard of it earlier, but now that I've latched on, I won't be letting go.

And being fashionably non-linear, here's my introduction: the seminal classic Tempest is a shoot-'em-up where you're a starship (as far as I could make out), and blast bugs into oblivion (again, my overactive imagination). (The PlayStation generation may be familiar with related, inspired games like N2O: Nitrous Oxide, which was one of the most embarrassing and context-insensitive usages of the Crystal Method's music, evar.) You go around and around and shoot things before the cosmic bastards kill you up close.

I love the graphic aesthetics of tsunami 2010: it looks like just about no other game I've seen, save the demoscene visuals the makers, apocalypse inc., have drawn from, and perhaps Darwinia, which has a similar pedegree. Text cues burst forth like ticker-tape parades, whisked wisps adorn the borders like a TV with vertical amnesia, warping from one grid to the next is a cybernetic OOBE unto itself. This eye candy is suitably, saturatingly colorful, and my fave watermelon colors even make a difference during the splash screen's gradient transitions. What's more, they literally make the screen like the phosphors are oozing, melting, desperate to get out — all while the addictive nature of gameplay sucks you in.

… and you will stay here a long while.

I can't possibly throw adequate words at the parachuting tunnels, the disco-lit matrices, nor the absence of any "standard" fonts to present text whatsoever. This means it's hard to read the help text which informs you that A is to shoot, but once you've got your keys, it's classic arcade schmuping to your heart's content.

Shortly before (or was it after? Time has become so fragile to me), I watched an awe-inspiring video of an aurora borealis on YouTube. The stages in tsunami 2010 don't look so far off from that ethereal glow. Knowing for me, just about everything in some way relates back to Second Life, so it is that I wish we could have such entrancing sky effects every time our avatars's heads craned upwards. Towards the heavens. I've seen some particle simulations grasping with great reach into the clouds, but not quite past the upper stratosphere.

It's a relief to realize even if noone can hear you scream in space, at least your laser zappers make satisfying synthetic thunks as they dispatch the evil, backstory-lacking minions from another galaxy.