Typhoon 2001 is kicking ---my bottom---!

[Zobeid]

The game is running fantastically on my cabinet.  It's great to play this with a spinner, and the audio is fantastic -- really giving the subwoofer a workout.

However. . .   I still have never managed to reach a bonus stage.  My best game today I managed to get five warp tokens. . .   One short of the six needed for a bonus stage.  Why is this so hard?   

    In the original Tempest 2000 you only needed three tokens for a bonus stage!  It was hard but it wasn't impossible.  Normal players -- not elite experts -- could expect to see bonus stages once in a while.  Sometimes more than one per game!  Why was this changed?  It's like the programmer decided bonus stages aren't meant for ordinary people, only some kind of special reward for the most godly players.

Jeff Minter once said the bonus stages in Tempest 2001 were meant to be a relaxing break from the chaos, with a slower pace.  But clearly they are not serving that function in Typhoon 2001: it's not much of a break if you can never reach one.

[ahofle]

I just discovered this excellent game recently too and I'm loving it.  I haven't gotten close to the bonus stage either though (and I never played Tempest 2000).