It's easy to blame the Jaguar's sadly short shelf life on the Tramiel marketing motif ("We don't have to support it. Whatever we put out there will sell. Besides, the word MULTIMEDIA is on the box."); but, as Adam pointed out to me during a coffee-booth discussion about the system, Atari was broke by the late '80s anyway, which best explains why the company's eligible early-'90s entry into the 32-bit arena (with a partially 64-bit box, at that) didn't get the push it needed to buy it a ride down the mainstream. Its games were superior among its peers, but they were too few sticks of dynamite to make a big enough explosion to rupture the outer layer of the gaming world.
When I say "superior," I mean it. The most intense Jag contests illustrate this beyond argument: Iron Soldier, Cybermorph, Alien vs. Predator and two enhanced and expanded old arcade coin-op titles, Tempest 2000 and Defender 2000, are all among my absolutely favorite video games of all time -- and I've played hundreds and hundreds. Those last two were conceived and programmed by a Mr. Jeff Minter, a.k.a. Yak, a British coder and garage-entrepreneur who'd founded the famous yet erratic Llamasoft, a one-man company that leased 8-bit games to bigger corporations. His love of hoofed mammals resulted in a somewhat demented, humorous twist to most of his games -- animals figured into them in one capacity or another, best exemplified by the name of one of his early-'80s games: Attack of the Mutant Camels. He was also responsible for a tremendous public-domain Atari ST and Commodore Amiga version of Robotron called Llamatron.
How do Yak's games hold up a few years after their appearances, now that we're upon the actual pinnacle of the century? Did they really improve upon their original arcade counterparts? Grab that large but comfortable Jag controller and let's have a play. (I'm warning you: I'll kick your ass.)
Tempest 2000 was released in 1994 to much acclaim. In fact, it's probably more responsible for moving the Jaguar units that did sell than all of the other available games combined. There hadn't been a single home console version of Atari's Vector classic Tempest available (I'm not counting the IBM) since its fanatical player base first assimilated in 1981, and attempts at emulating it in the 8-bit universe, like Electronic Arts's Axis Assassin, fell far short; add to this the fact that the revamp really was incredible, and compound it with bizarre, dramatic magazine ads and a handful of raving reviews, and you can understand why most early Jaguar patrons picked this cart up along with their actual units.
Like with Defender 2000, a comparison between this package and the original game is rendered moot by the provision of the actual "classic" Tempest on the main menu as an alternative to the 2000 version. The coin-op is perfectly rendered in every way, but Classic Tempest suffers a little in one area where Classic Defender does not: Coin-op Tempest featured a rotary knob that delivered quite a large part of the game's stimulating feel and addictive player-power appeal. The Jaguar controller is among the best ever made for any system, but in a game like Tempest, one has to admit that arrow buttons just don't feel as cool as a little wheel that you can spin violently.
Except for this, though, Classic Tempest brings back the arcade game vividly and without flaw, and it's quite a thrill; and Tempest 2000 itself is utterly over-the-top, excessive action that engages players at any difficulty level and even presents a rigorous "Beastly Mode" after you've completed all of the levels (a nearly impossible feat in itself -- thank you, thank you) which toughens the enemies and maliciously slows your blasts down a bit.
Besides its fresh flair for spectacle, extravagant explosions and more numerous colors, Tempest 2000 adds two main beneficial elements to the original idea: imaginative new baddies and ass-saving power-ups. The Super Zapper was always that one bailout on the threshold of panic, the monumentally relieving button-slap that turned the player from a trapped mouse to an omnipotent god -- but just once per wave. This Smart-Bomb equivalent remains useful in Tempest 2000, but it now serves as a meantime refuge while the player waits for one of the enemies he's vaporizing to turn into a power-up. The most useful two are a (greatly) enhanced laser -- usually the first available power-up, thankfully -- and the ability to jump. This latter supplement has saved me countless times from being snatched by one of the invariably abundant Flippers that reach the perimeter and clink around it with no good intentions.
An interesting type of power-up is a bonus-round toggle: It only appears after you've gotten most all of the other possible enhancements. Grabbing three of these warp power-ups enables you to play the bonus round after you complete the current screen. There are three of these rounds, depending on what screen you've been playing, and they each offer a five-wave jump and multitudinous points if you reach the end. All three are quite beautiful graphically, but sluggish and lackluster game-play wise. I usually deliberately miss the next marker or bend in any of these stay-on-the-trail rounds to get back to the actual, infinitely more arresting game itself.
All of the old enemies are here, but there are interesting new ones: Mutant Flippers are a lot more aggressive then their older relatives; Mirrors reflect your blasts back at you, necessitating a shoot-and-dodge strategy, and take several hits to wipe out; Demon Heads explode and shoot horns at your blaster when you kill them; and UFOs fly above your gun instead of approaching from the distance like everything else. These late-game nasties require the jump power-up to obliterate, a condition that highly successfully works the jump feature into the new game at a level of innovation beyond even that power-up's very useful early-wave appearances.
So Tempest 2000 is mostly an improvement, and it's quite addictive and never lets the player take a breath (my kind of game!). But there are a couple of things that make it a more tedious game than it could be, and these aspects concern the flair for spectacle that I mentioned earlier. The demonstrations of graphical savvy go a bit overboard and wind up being detrimental to the player's enjoyment of the game (or my enjoyment of it, anyway).
First of all, there's this thing that you're supposed to look forward to acquiring called the AI (Artificial Intelligence) Droid. When you grab the power-up that makes it appear, it flies around far above the perimeter of the playfield and shoots everything for you. I don't want something playing my game for me. All it really does is make it hard to see what's coming at you; once you discern your next target, the Droid's already on it and your game has changed to a dodging test.
Visibility is also the mark of my next gripe: Whenever you get an extra life or grab a power-up, huge congratulatory words fly out from center-screen and grow to fill the entire view for a couple seconds. As anyone who's played Tempest (and especially 2000) knows, a couple seconds of obstructed sight can determine whether you live or die. Being a video game veteran from way back, I can certainly handle a lot of things going on at once, but to have my vision completely blocked by unnecessary showiness robs me of the raw arcade quality of any game no matter how good it is. Throw in the stupid '80s slang samples -- "Excellent!" "Yes! Yes! Yes" -- and the annoying "Super Zapper recharge!" voice that concludes each wave, and you have a game that, while in this manner certainly reminiscent of the era in which Tempest first flourished, consists in part of unfortunate aggravating moments that would have strengthened the game with their omittance.
1995's Defender 2000 has two utterly debilitating problems, one of them being a returned nuisance from Tempest 2000: Easily 90% of the time, your ship is assisted by a smaller vessel (yep, another AI Droid) that plays most of the game for you. If you shoot a Lander that's kidnapping a Humanoid, your little buddy flies ahead and rescues the captive for you. He even deposits it back on the planet surface. He helps you kill bad guys as well, and basically does everything except turn the game off and tuck you into bed. It takes away from what would be a fun Defender enhancement with neat new enemies -- if it weren't for the player's perspective on the playing area.
For Tempest 2000, Yak decided to make the "camera" follow the player's blaster around the playfield. This isn't too inhibiting, because it's not really a close-up; the corridors simply shift around a bit to follow the player's movement, even though it's understood that they're actually stationary. During some waves, however, the bumpy angles of the battle area prevent seeing very far to the left or right, which results in death more often than it should. There's an option to quickly pull the view back and keep the corridors stationary, but for some reason it makes them really small, and it's hard to see anything at that distance. I would've liked this option to keep the playfield large and just quit moving the "camera," however slightly. For some reason, this trait is also found in Classic Tempest, an addition that definitely decrements its faithfulness to the original.
Why do I bring this up here? Because this "follow-the-player camera" is what completely ruins Defender 2000. It's even more impairing than the intrusive AI ship: You can't see most of the sky and still keep the planet surface in sight. The screen scrolls slightly up and down in addition to the usual side-scrolling. This means that your Humanoids and any aliens creeping below you are lost to view while you're taking care of business up in the air. This also means that it's very easy to run into things at any time, since the scanner isn't very precise -- and keeping yourself from flying too fast and colliding with enemies takes up most of your time, forestalling any strategies that might be put to use instead. I don't even play Defender 2000. I think I've tried it a total of five times in the year or so that I've owned this cartridge. It's a shame, because one of the new enemies, the Lander-Launcher -- its function obvious -- adds an interesting twist to the concept of wave-clearing.
But Classic Defender is as exhilarating as Defender 2000 is cumbersome. This adaptation of the old coin-op alone was worth getting the cart. Everything's perfect, and you get the same adrenaline attacks and alternating feelings of power and panic when you play this translation. The graphics look exactly the same, the mechanics feel exactly the same, and although they seem a little faster than before, the explosions are all just as glorious.
I recently bought the Williams collection Arcade's Greatest Hits for the Playstation. The games, as you know, are emulated directly from the original coin-op motherboards. I highly recommend this one, by the way; it contains many interview clips that feature game designers, including Eugene Jarvis himself (writer of Defender). Anyway, playing the original version really emphasizes how well Yak did in programming it from scratch and endeavoring to make it look and feel the same. He really did a great job. Differences are minor: The bad guys in his version take longer to speed up than in the original, and the Landers in particular start off a bit slower, ascending with hostages more slowly at first than their predecessors. But it should be pointed out that neither the Jag version nor the Sony one provide a controller that comes close to matching the arcade panel. The utter mastery over the ship that's possible with the coin-op controls just can't be achieved with a joypad.
Both 2000 titles have extra games between Classic and 2000: You can opt for Tempest Plus or Defender Plus. The former never gets played on my Jag. It's not that it's a bad game, it's just that it's Classic Tempest with a couple minor attributes from 2000 thrown in. It feels schizophrenic, and I'd rather go to one extreme or the other, y'know? It features a simultaneous-two-player mode: The screen is split vertically and you see your buddy down at the distant end of the tubes. Death-match does not work with Tempest. I don't know how much more clearly I can put it.
But Defender Plus! Now, there's a video game! This option should have been called Defender 2000 instead of the sad (but admittedly pretty) dodging contest that was actually given that title. I don't know if you can really improve upon the original Defender, but if you could, this game would hit pretty close to the mark.
For one thing, Metropolis Digital's graphics are absolutely stunning, the centerpieces being the throbbing, translucent mountain range and the multidimensional star scrolling. Your ship maxes-out at a blinding speed and your laser is now rapid-fire (i.e. it keeps firing as the button's held down), allowing you to race along and clear out baddies like you're ice-skating through soap suds (glancing often at the scanner, of course).
A wonderful new firing feature also figures into the terrific mechanics: If you hold down the button to rapid-fire, you can move your ship backward. Pushing opposite the direction you're facing usually reverses your ship, of course, but as long as the button's down in this installment, you can backtrack, circle around and do all sorts of neat stuff, since you won't turn around until you let go of the button. This is especially fun when you've just demolished a Pod and a flock of Swarmers emerges; you can take out the whole group with a couple up-down sweeps of your overwhelming laser.
You definitely need this quality for the toughest new enemy, the Big Space-Station-Looking Thing. That's my name for it, anyway; the manual for this cartridge absolutely sucks, and Defender Plus is reduced to two or three paragraphs. None of the enemies are explained, nor is the extra firing-control feature I disclosed. The book's skimpiness probably has something to do with the fact that Atari saw fit to squeeze three languages into most of their Jaguar game manuals. At least other titles come with complete directions; this handbook may as well not even exist.
Anyway, the BSSLT is really frustrating at first, because as you fly over it unawares, it launches itself upward from its hiding place below the planet surface, giving you absolutely no reaction time before your ship bursts in an impressive cloud of color. But what initially seems like cop-out bad-guy addition (one of my pet peeves, as you know) turns out to be a quite gripping, quite beatable super-enemy. All you have to do is slink along near the bottom of the playfield with the fire button down, careful not to kill Humanoids of course. No hiding BSSLT can escape your wrath if you hunt like this, and it adds an unexpected pensive quality to the formerly purely vicious Defender concept while adding to the panic felt when you hear the cry of an abducted Humanoid: You can't just race recklessly to the scene of the crime anymore (at least in wave 4 and above). The BSSLT also launches little hopping things at you that can take you right out if you're not careful to avoid them; they boink back and forth at sweeping angles and have a tendency to evade sight.
Another fascinating new enemy appears after you beat wave 15 (or 16; I can't remember which, but I've done it a few times): A giant guy in a jet-propelled spacesuit, even bigger than your huge ship, zooms ruinously over the planet, ready to ram your ship into pieces. Like the BSSLT, this guy requires several blasts to take out, but you can have a lot of fun obliterating him; and, like the BSSLT, his destruction scores very high.
Another fantastic element in Defender Plus is the hyperspace portal called the Stargate, revived from an arcade game called, oddly enough, Stargate -- the original Defender's sequel. Flying into the portal either warps your spaceship halfway around the planet or brings you to the site of an abduction if any are taking place. Flying into it with at least a few Humanoids in tow warps you ahead as many waves as Humanoids you're carrying.
Speaking of neat tricks, entering "Ovine" as your name in the Defender Plus high-score table and then starting a game by pushing the A button instead of B will transform your ship into a giant sheep! You're protecting little llamas instead of Humanoids, and deploying a Smart Bomb renders a moo-like sound. While Flossie's thrusting (for this is surely a graphical depiction of Yak's favorite sheep that he owns), the exhaust egresses humorously from under her lifted tail. Flatulence Fuel? Do I detect a possible breakthrough for NASA here?
Also, entering "Nolan" (meaning Bushnell, of course) in any of the cart's high-score tables will give you a further option besides the three Defender games: Plasma Pong!
Overall, Yak and his graphic teams did an amazing and enthralling job of updating two of the gaming world's most beloved entities, and as long as he never comes out with, say, Congo Bongo 2000, his reputation remains optimum. -- CF