A crazy acid trip mixed with old-school arcade shooter elements, find out what we thought about this artistic expression of gaming.
by:
August 24, 2007
Created by Jeff Minter, the creator of Tempest 2000, in many ways it is similar as well. The game has you as a shape that sort of resembles a giraffe shooting at X shapes coming at you that represent bulls. Space Giraffe is the kind of game that you will either love or hate; it is difficult to review a game that is very much in the same vein as hits such as Geometry Wars; take a solid older concept and apply a fresh layer of next-generation over it. When you first begin the title a shape of a monochromatic giraffe bounces up and down with what sounds like a child’s voice saying numbers and letters in the background. The game itself is like a bad-acid trip thanks to it being based off of the Xbox 360’s music visualizer software. You instantly know from the start that you are in for a strange and psychedelic experience when the first level is called “The Eyes of Allard”. In the background you see a stock photo of one of the creators of the Xbox brand, J. Allard and it sort of acts as a tutorial level as well. Besides that you have an actual tutorial level, which can be helpful in figuring out what exactly is going on.
The game seems to have been tailored for those of us that spend lots of time posting on videogame message boards, watch Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and as it is common amongst many Xbox Live users, dabble in some drugs. You are to shoot the bulls as and guide your giraffe on a track, the further you shoot the longer your range will be, making a line that will destroy the bulls. As you do this you must figure out what exactly are projectiles coming at you, what are enemies and what are pods. Pods help boost your points, along with giving you extra lives after you collect a certain amount. It starts out simple enough; the areas you are on aren’t to complicated, until you get to about level 35, wherein the levels allow you to scale up the “walls” spinning in circles if you choose to do so. If you find yourself in trouble and there are to many enemies coming at you, you can always drop a bomb as well that clears everything on the board. You can also speed your giraffe up, but this really seems to have little point other than to get out of the incredibly small levels faster. At the end of each level the game uses “1337” terms like “But your giraffe is in another castle!” “You are meh” and other terms that only the hardcore gamer or Internet user would really understand.
Visually the game is crazy, and the hard-hitting electronic beats that go along with it matches. After about twenty minutes of playing I highly recommend that you step away from the game and let your eyes readjust, something like this can give you headaches, and it is amazing that a game with visuals like that was even allowed out. The entire game is silly, so the controls, gameplay, visuals, and sound all blend together with that theme nicely, with the only real challenge that the game slightly bumps up the number of incoming enemies and makes the visuals even harder to figure out as you go along. It would have been nice to see a bit more to the game such as perhaps a visualizer for your own music in the vein of Boom Boom Rocket, but at 400 Points or five bucks it still isn’t bad for what your getting. The interesting thing about the title, that despite how hectic, colorful, and extreme it is all around, you somehow adjust so well that shooting and advancing becomes second nature, but it will of course come at the price of crossed-eyes. If nothing else, Space Giraffe is more a piece of art than a videogame, and like most good art, tons of people will be disgusted and hate it. Others like me, will like the style and the artistic value it represents.
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At 400 Points or five bucks, the game is essentially what you can play in the demo for free but more of it as you advance along. I think for many of us that is really all we can take, because I don’t know about you but my eye sight is bad enough; I don’t want to go completely blind.
