Tempest

The original Tempest was an Atari cabinet from 1981 and one of the few major titles built on a colour vector display rather than raster graphics. You control a shooter that slides around the rim of a tube-shaped field, firing down into the depth at enemies climbing toward you. The idea is simple, but the speed and the clarity of the geometry made it one of the defining machines of the arcade golden age and a template that dozens of later games returned to.

This ZX Spectrum conversion, issued by Electric Dreams Software, takes on an essentially impossible brief: reproducing a vector cabinet on a machine with attribute-based colour and no hardware acceleration whatsoever. The result means simpler shapes, fewer simultaneous enemies and a different rhythm from the coin-op. Anyone who knows the arcade version will spot the compromises immediately. Anyone who does not still gets a fast shooter built on a perspective that was genuinely unusual on eight-bit home computers.

Arcade conversions were effectively their own category on the Spectrum in this period. Everyone understood a home version would be a compromise; the question was how well the programmer managed it within the memory available. With Tempest the deciding factor is how smoothly your shooter rotates around the rim, because that motion carries the entire game. The control scheme is minimal: move along the edge, fire, and use the emergency blast sparingly.

Here it runs directly in the browser with nothing to install. Treat it as a short-session score chaser rather than an evening's entertainment. It also serves as a clear demonstration of what home computers could and could not do while chasing purpose-built arcade hardware.