Tempo

Tempo is a colorful platformer in which music takes center stage, and the hero is a tall, skinny grasshopper-like creature with his own band. The player moves through levels built around musical motifs — from sheet-music staves through concert stages to environments resembling the inside of musical instruments — jumping, attacking, and collecting items that alter the character's abilities. Besides classic running and jumping, the game features moving platforms, bounce elements, and segments where you need to progress in rhythm. A companion character flies around the player and helps depending on the situation, which gives the gameplay a fresh dynamic. The levels are also structured vertically and reward exploration, so it pays to try paths that run against the main direction of progress too.

Visually, this is one of the add-on's most striking titles. The game relies on large, expressively animated characters, a rich color palette, and layered backgrounds that clearly show the 32X had a noticeable edge over the Mega Drive in the number of displayable colors. The main hero's animation has its own sense of humor — stretching, hopping, comically flopping down — and it comes paired with a musical score that's essential to the game; the tunes aren't just backdrop but set the mood and pace of each level. The atmosphere is light, playful, and slightly zany, close to the Japanese mascot platformers of the era.

At the time, Tempo reached a rather small audience, since the 32X had a short lifespan and the game came out when interest in the add-on had already faded. Reviews praised the concept and visual side, with reservations aimed at the difficulty and occasionally imprecise jumping. It brought to the genre one of the first attempts to build a platformer around a musical theme, a direction that would later be developed elsewhere. Today it's a charming curiosity worth seeing for its style and a mascot unlike any other. Among collectors, it's also one of the titles that make an otherwise short 32X library seem more interesting than the number of released games would suggest.