Shoot Speed/Kill Light
By Fuseball

Xbox Live Arcade is littered with attempts to capture the essence of just-one-more-go gaming. Classic coin-ops appear weekly, sporting HD-friendly makeovers and joypad-cosy controls. It’s rarely satisfying; neither a gentle jog down memory lane nor an eye-popping reinvention. Somehow, Space Giraffe is peculiarly and spectacularly both.

Camelopardus Supernova

At its heart, Space Giraffe is an arcade game. The next evolutionary step in a long lineage of coin-gobbling shooters. Taking cues from Tempest, Juno First and the pyrotechnic blasters of Eugene Jarvis, it’s a game that’s unafraid to be challenging, intimidating even, in the way that Defender or even Asteroids could be to the unprepared. In an age of modulated gaming experiences, peppered with games where you cannot die and coin-ops, where your pound buys you three minutes, rather than three lives, that’s something of a bold move. Progress and high scores are built on learnt techniques, honed skills and practice. It’s that bedrock of arcade-rooted playability and challenge that keeps Space Giraffe’s hooves firmly on the ground, even when the sensory onslaught threatens on occasion to overwhelm the player.

My eyes! My beautiful eyes!

Of course, Jeff Minter and Llamasoft have been here before. Tempest 2000 was an inspired reworking of an Atari classic, and Llamatron spun the sprite overload of Robotron into new comic shapes. If anything, Space Giraffe sees Llamasoft delving further back into their past. There’s an invention and playfulness here that we’ve not seen in Jeff’s work since the 8-bit days. Rules and conventions are gleefully challenged, subverted and warped, and what’s remarkable is how much it gets right; consistently hitting a sweet spot between the experimental and the familiar. The visual touchstone is the stargate climax of 2001; an eye-watering headrush through boiling vistas of plasma. For all their beauty, those retina-searing environments are integral to the way each of Space Giraffe’s 100 levels play; as much an antagonist and character as any of the game’s conventional foes.

Sorry mate. You'll have to evolve a bit before playing Space Giraffe.

If there’s a flaw to Space Giraffe it’s that it can take the player anything from a few goes to a few hours to acclimatize to its idiosyncratic ways. Unflinchingly faithful to its own aesthetic rules, its audiovisual clues have to be learnt and tuned into. However, once you’ve got your eye in, the difficulty is beautifully tuned to give a natural ebb and flow. You’ll curse some levels and embrace others.

Admittedly, the combination of blisteringly hardcore difficulty and obscure comic and cultural references is something of an acquired taste. The sound design particularly, whilst cleverly meshed with the gameplay, is eccentric and could easily see the game written off as quirky or even amateurish by less open-minded players.

Guaranteed cunty bastard level (or your money back).

Whilst these potential shortcomings are merely a matter of taste and personal preference, there’s one genuine moment of misjudgement in Space Giraffe. In a game as tough and uncompromising as this, a post-level message telling the player that they are ‘Meh’ or ‘Bland’ comes across as a slap in the face. For many players, merely surviving some of these levels should be a cause for celebration. By all means congratulate exceptional performances but insulting those players posting lesser scores is an unnecessary mistake.

Ultimately these occasional fumbles are easily forgivable and vastly outweighed by the plusses. Not least of which is a perfectly judged level start system, whereby so long as you have three lives or more, the game records your best score at the end of each level and lets you continue from that point. It's a simple touch but it greatly expands the ways you can play the game; from zoned out marathon sessions to short burst point-whoring runs to boost your level start bonuses.

The '70s patterned carpet effects were not to every player's taste.

As with the most enduring of arcade classics, there's a risk/reward dynamic at the core of Space Giraffe that actively encourages creative stylish play. Indeed, the sensation of recklessly 'bulling' through a crowd of enemies is one of this year's gaming highlights.

Similar joyous and inspired moments continue throughout the game. From the disruptive glory of 'Wrong Pill' to the exquisite fizz of Feedback Monsters (quite possibly the most ingenious adversary invented since I, Robot's Viewer Killer) to an array of Achievements that provide genuine challenge and scope for refined play, Space Giraffe offers an embarrassment of gaming riches.

Give it your beer money and a small investment of time, and you’ll find yourself playing what is arguably Jeff Minter’s finest hour, and there really aren’t too many industry veterans that can lay claim to creating something so unique and sharply realized a good quarter century into their career.

2007

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