Tempo

Tempo
Developers: Sega, Red Company Publishers: Sega (JP/US), Tec Toy (BR) Platform: 32X Released in JP: March 24, 1995 Released in US: 1995 Released in BR: 1995 This game has unused graphics. This game has debugging material. This game has a prototype article This game has a prerelease article

Tempo is a cutesy 2D musical platformer for the ill-fated 32X that also had horrendous US cover art. It was followed by Tempo Jr. for the Game Gear, then by an awesome Japan-only Sega Saturn entry crafted by the masterminds behind the Bonk/PC Genjin games.

Debug Menu

The debug menu remains in the final, but was dummied-out. It can be accessed by modifying the address $07D578:4E71 or by using Game Genie code RHLT-R6X2 in the Gens emulator (it won't work on real hardware).

To toggle it on/off, hold A + B + C and press Right on the D-Pad. To change between CG mode (patterns) and CL mode (colors), hold Start and press any direction on the D-Pad.

To change the select mode, hold A and press a direction. When in "cell edit" mode, press B to overwrite a pixel with the current color (selected in CL mode).

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  The text/palette viewer.

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  The text editor... thing.

Unreachable Endings

To do: Actually describe the way to get each ending here.

There are six endings, with different pictures shown during the credits, which are given depending on your score. Unfortunately, even when playing in Hard Mode (with 10x bonuses), skimming through the levels flawlessly and having a perfect performance at Bonus Levels, half the endings are still inaccessible due to some obscenely-high score requirements.

This said, it is possible (but extremely hard) to get them normally without any cheats by abusing continues and grinding in the last level for about six hours.

An early prototype had enemies giving more points when defeated, so it seems the programmers forgot to lower the score requirements as development progressed.