I'd pretty much decided to go acquire a Vita today on which to play Jeff Minter's new game TxK. After discovering my mom was in the hospital, I was pushed over the brink – I wanted something to distract myself from worrying about her.
This isn't the first time Minter has been a system seller for me; the promise of him working on an ultimately-cancelled game on the GameCube was part of why I got one of those (that and Treasure doing exclusives for it), and his Space Giraffe helped sway me to a 360. Minter's a long-time favorite developer since the c64 days; I'm pretty much one of his One Thousand True Fans. I'll buy pretty much anything he puts out on a machine I have. So this review may be kind of biased.
I now have a $250 device (including the expensive Sony memory card it didn't come with) that plays a sweeter version of Tempest that was in the original arcade cabinet, and fits in my pocket. As always I wish I had a spiny wheel, and holding the Vita for extended periods of time starts to hurt, but goddamn, I have a $250 pocket sized device that plays a note-perfect version of Super Tempest, this is everything ten year old me didn't dare to ever dream of. Well, actually purse sized, what with me never wearing pants. But you get the idea.
I've only had a few games so far. Started to get the hang of its systems. Seen the delightfully chill bonus round twice, and very quickly died.
It is, of course, not actually a vector display. But it's a perfect fake. I can't see any pixels, and the Vita can throw around a hell of a lot of fake vectors. Lots more than a real vector display ever could. TxK is quite unabashedly Tempest, but it's super space Tempest that never has to worry about how long it takes to move the beam around. Every level is full of weird faint background elements, the enemies are surprisingly detailed.
It looks pretty in screenshots, but it's amazing in motion. Everything is silky smooth; the abstract neon shapes are instantly recognizable as one enemy or another. It doesn't rely on sound cues as much as Giraffe did; this is a game for one sense only. But it sure makes that sense happy.
One thing I like is that once you begin to get the hang of it there's a lot of little moments that make you feel awesome. Getting saved from an enemy because you picked up a power up as it was dragging you down the web, which made the AI droid pop up and shoot it. Saving yourself from an enemy dragging you down by a timely super zap. Spawning an extra life (cued by a robot voice saying “extra”), dying, and grabbing the life (robot says “life”) as you drop down onto the edge of the web. It makes you say “Yesssss!” when things like that happen, and there's a decent number of them. Ultimately this is a cruel and unforgiving game, but along the way to your doom it wants to give you a lot of little moments where you feel like a rock star. That's important!
It does feel a little cramped sometimes. The tiny screen plus the odd shapes of some levels means it's easy to lose track of enemies off the edge of the screen sometimes. And the short throw of the Vita's stick is honestly little different from using d-pad so far. This may change if I get some of those attachments that mimick the horns on a PS controller, I may just not have much finesse due to how I end up holding the thing.
Me being me, I kind of wish it had a “more visual feedback” mode. But I am in the .5% of the gaming public who was wired to appreciate Minter's previous Tempest riff “Space Giraffe”. Most people are not a life support system for a visual cortex like me. This game can be appreciated by people who have devoted a more normal amount of their processing power to their eyes. And if it does start feeling easy, hey, 360s are cheap now. You know what to graduate to.
I spent $250 for this game, and this game alone. There are a few other Vita-only games I'll probably get later on. But I feel like I will be getting my money's worth even if I buy nothing else for this machine.
I guess that's a pretty strong recommendation.
If you already have a Vita it's only ten bucks. If you have any love for arcadey shootemups, or for vector displays, I think this one is really a no-brainer of a purchase.