Jeff Minter returns to Tempest with new Vita game

Llamasoft, the two-man studio headed up by legendary developer Jeff Minter, is returning to Tempest for a new PlayStation Vita called TxK.

Although making his name in the '80s with games such as Gridrunner and Attack of the Mutant Camels, Minter's reboot of Tempest for Atari's Jaguar is one of his most fondly remembered titles.

"19 years ago saw the release of one of the best games Llamasoft ever made, a game which came to be recognised as one of the best games on an entire system - Tempest 2000 on the Atari Jaguar," reads Minter's blog. "I've often thought that one day I would like to revisit that game and do some kind of an updated version on modern hardware."

Minter famously did return to the classic shooter template in one of his most high profile games since Tempest 2000, 2008's Space Giraffe - although it proved not to everyone's taste upon its release for the Xbox 360.

"For those players that got what we were trying to do, Space Giraffe could be an almost transcendental experience, and those people who love it REALLY love it," said Minter. "In that I still feel that we succeeded admirably. But I also have to admit that the game was divisive; some people didn't like the complete immersion in eyeball-searing psychedelia and the gameplay modifications that made it not quite the pure shooty T2K upgrade that the initial look of the game seemed to promise."

TxK, then, will be " the pure, straightforward shooter that maybe you hoped for when you first saw Space Giraffe," in Minter's own words. There's no word on release timing, although it's worth keeping an eye on Llamasoft's blog for development updates.

And if you want to reacquaint yourselves with the genius of Llamasoft, there are rich pickings on mobile. GoatUp 2 has just been released, and there's a superlative version of Gridrunner available for both iOS and Android.