Llamasoft has been toiling away in the strange and difficult land of iOS for the last couple of years,  pumping out one game after another at a delightfully quick pace.  The “race to the bottom” pricing structure isn’t anybody’s friend, though, so apparently it’s now time to think bigger again.  “Bigger” as in “sequel to the most popular game in Llamasoft’s stable”, in fact, and that game is Tempest 2000.  TxK was announced this week, and while details are scarce and screenshots nonexistent, there’s plenty of excitement to fill in those gaps.

TxK is going to be Tempest in all but name, primarily because with the state Atari is in, who knows where the rights have got to?  Somebody somewhere has that information, theoretically, but they can’t be found.  Much like the rights to No One Lives Forever, Tempest is in a legal limbo. So TxK is not Tempest at all, but rather an extrapolation on the feel and gameplay ideas of Tempest 2000.  Sure, it’s Jeff Minter creating pure shooting action along the edge of the web as countless terrible things rise to the top in an attempt to drag you down, but with its own identity whose rights aren’t held by another company.

TxK is a fair way off at this point, primarily because Llamasoft only got their Vita dev units on Tuesday, April 9.  The current plan is to have the game released by the end of the year on Vita, with PC and Mac versions following along three months later.  It’s possible there may be other versions too, but it’s just too early to say yet.  In the meantime, music in the style of Tempest 2000 is being solicited over at the Llamasoft forums, so if you’ve got a high energy instrumental techno track burning in your soul and looking for a good home (and you work cheap), head on over and provide a link.  Maybe we’ll be hearing your music as we fly along the top of the web, desperately holding back the encroaching waves of inevitable death.