Posts Tagged ‘Jeff Minter’

Jeff Minter making Tempest 4000 for Atari

Jeff Minter is revisiting Tempest later this year in Tempest 4000, the creature wearing the skin of Atari announced today. This is mighty surprising, considering Minter has said the creature tried to kill his TxK, the Tempest-ish shooter he released in 2014. Their apparent reconciliation is definitely welcome news, mind. No one does loud, colourful, intense, and silly arcade action just like Minter. He was behind Tempest 2000, the widely-admired Tempest remake first released on Atari Jaguar, and has only grown more Minterly across the years through games including Space Giraffe and Polybius. Read the rest of this entry »

Minter is coming: Polybius PC version in the works

Polybius

Polybius [official site], the psychedelic arcade shooter currently making waves on Playstation VR, is coming to PC. Huzzah! It’s from Jeff Minter, the arcade game veteran that made Space Giraffe, Gridrunner, Revenge of the Mutant Camels, and Tempest 2000, so you know it’s good.

Minter has mentioned a PC port before but, given the trouble last time Llamasoft tried to bring a game to PC, it’s good to hear this is going ahead. He confirmed work on the PC port by posting an image on Twitter of him working in his office, which is crammed with gaming knick-knacks (including a plushy Mario) and VR headsets. He’s also wearing a Christmas jumper. In May! Because why not?

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Eat Electric Death: Atari Trying To Block Jeff Minter’s TxK

Yeah, Atari.

Jeff Minter has been making tip-top arcade shooters for a good thirty years now, including classics like Space Giraffe, Gridrunner, Revenge of the Mutant Camels, and Tempest 2000. That last one is coming back to bite him in the bottom.

TxK [official site] is his latest loud and colourful and silly and exciting shooter, and I’ve been waiting patiently for the PC port since its Vita debut last year. That port is now scrapped, thanks to the terrible creature wearing the skin of Atari. Minter says the publishers of Tempest 2000 claim that TxK is ripping it off, and he can’t afford a legal battle to defend it.

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Doubleplusgood: Gridrunner++ Now Available Free

I haven’t played any version of Gridrunner so I’m not the best person to provide an informed opinion as to its psychedelic charms. It’s a Llamasoft game though and I do have some experience with Minter’s menagerie of hyper-colourful shooters. One of the games I spent many an evening with as a child was Revenge of the Mutant Camels and I was probably one of the few teenagers in Manchester who had gorged on digital happy pills and pixellated representations of Aunt Mary’s magical cigarettes, but had never even seen an illicit substance in the real world. Gridrunner doesn’t look quite as mad and news that the doubleplus version is now free to download should send a warming pulse of neon bliss across the cockles. You can find it here.

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Unknown Pleasures 2009: Gridrunner+++

Shooting upwards. It is a shooting-upwards game.

LLamasoft’s last – Space Giraffe – was a gloriously misunderstood classic. Llamasoft’s next move is to return to the scene of a previous triumph. Despite being a Pocket-PC-Port, Gridrunner++ was one of my favourite shooters of this decade. For one of the greatest all-time arcades creators to want to expand upon it is the sort of thing which makes me order in a new set of adrenaline glands from my developing-world meat-banks. I suspect I’m going need them. We talk to ungulate-in-chief Jeff Minter about it, and its PC-first release in April…
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Space Giraffe PC Imminent


A new post on the Llamasoft site has revealed that Space Giraffe for PC is almost ready! Llamasoft’s Giles reports that “minor tweaks” are still to be performed on the expanded and possible somewhat-less-psychedelic PC version of the game, but that it is otherwise complete:

[W]hat you are going to get is Space Giraffe exactly as you seen it on the 360 PLUS an “expansion pack” with 100 NEW levels that “no one else has seen before”, some of them could be a bit more “vanilla” for those that found the SG original graphics maybe a bit “too blasting for their own taste” we wish this time to really manage to pleasure more and less psychedelic users

More on this when we get our hands on the PC version of Minter’s psychedelic synapse-curdler. Thanks Offworld!