Codename:Tenka was a first person shooter developed by Sony Liverpool. In Tenka the player takes the role of Joseph D. Tenka as he battles to understand his surroundings and his personal history. The most notable aspect of Tenka is that it was one of the first 3D shooters on Playstation to feature real 3D enemies. In most other respects Tenka is a rather unremarkable game which received moderate critical acclaim and luke warm sales.
The plot in Codename: Tenka is that, in the year 2096, the Earth has become an over polluted, war torn wasteland, and those inhabitants left on Earth dream only of making their escape to off-world colonies, where life promises to be paradise. Tenka laboured for many years to travel to a colony, only to find that his chosen planet of Extruvius 328 - B is Trojan Inc.'s manufacturing plant for bionoids. Clients who "will not be missed" are taken to the planet and used in the creation of this deadly warrior Bionoids. Someone set's you free in the opening FMV, and led by a rogue version of an AI called ZENITH inbetween missions, your mission is to get off the planet. Players who managed to reach the end of the game were rewarded with a full motion video clip of the hero being arbitrarily slain by a female robot, presumed to be ZENITH - such is life in the future.
The game had a number of interesting gameplay features - namely it's weapon, an "Innovative Self-Generating Polymorphic armoury" (or SG-26), similar to the Lawgiver possessed by Judge Dredd. Throughout the game, certain enemies drop cubes which add a new feature to the gun - starting out with a single shot function, slowly upgrading to rapid fire, adding features such as a laser, mines, rockets and grenades.
The most curious piece of trivia about Tenka is that the hero was named after Joseph Deacon, a British author who was born with Cerebral Palsy.
In Europe Codename:Tenka was released as Lifeforce:Tenka.
A demo of the game appeared on the European version of "Demo 1", a demo disk that was packaged alongside the Playstation.
Trivia
Mentioned on 9/24/2012 edition of the Giant Bombcast. When asked the name of any first person shooters developed in Japan, Tenka was named, along with the Coded Arms series.
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