Space Giraffe is an XBLA title by Jeff Minter in the vein of Tempest and Minter’s own Tempest 2000. It’s also probably the only game in recent memory to have gotten such wildly disparate reviews. From a 2/10 from the Official Xbox Magazine all the way up to a solid 8/10 from the UK’s Edge and everything in between, this game is being praised and hated at the same time by many different publications around the globe. Why is this so? Different reviews for any given game don’t usually differ for more than 2 or 3 points so what makes this game so different?
At its core, Space Giraffe is not really all that different than most arcade games out there. You’re a ship (or a space giraffe as the case may be) and you have to shoot a slew of enemies in the hopes that you can stay alive long enough to reach the next level. Different enemies have different patterns and are handled differently, you gain extra lives every now and then and, like many arcade games of old, you’ll want to replay levels over and over to milk every last point so you can brag about how good your final score is in online leaderboards. As simple as this sounds, there’s a fair amount of complexity to this (bulling, jump pods, bouncing bullets, milking flowers, sneeze bonuses and so on and so forth) but the biggest point of contention here, and quite possibly the sole reason for those inconsistent review scores, is the “I can’t see what the hell is going on” issue.
Space Giraffe is a very demanding game. Not only is the tutorial extremely poor, leaving you to figure out most even the basic gameplay features on your own, but it asks you to constantly keep all those various game mechanics in the back or your head so that you may exploit them at the right time and, most importantly, it demands that you visually and aurally remain 100% invested in the game. And that’s because the slightest sound that you miss or the most subtle visual cue that you ignore will result in your death. The game never fails to warn you of what’s coming but unless you trouble yourself with finding these signals amidst the constant chaos on-screen, you will never see or hear them. You will probably die in this game often and, more often than not, you won’t know what hit you. The good thing is that the majority of the time, postmortem, you won’t be thinking “the game didn’t tell me that was coming I and died” but rather “I didn’t pay attention to what was coming and I died.” In that sense, the game is very successful in that you never really feel cheated after death, as long as you’re willing to meet the game’s demanding expectations, that is.
Which brings me back to my first question: How to review Space Giraffe? If I were reviewing it for myself, based solely on the enjoyment that I personally got out of it given my personal preferences and tastes in video games, I’d give it a 7 or 8, give or take. The issue becomes fairly more complicated if my review were a way of recommending the title to somebody else (which is, incidentally, a distinction that reviewers should make and the reason why I believe this game’s reviews got damn near every single number imaginable). In that sense and given what I’ve talked about this game so far and how long I’ve played it, I find it nearly impossible to box it in a number within a numeric scale like most other games. I can’t say “don’t buy it” because it is definitely a rewarding game if you choose to invest in it. I can’t say “try it” because that most likely means you’ll hate it after 2 minutes and you’ll never really bother with it again. I can’t say “buy it” either because it’s not really something everybody will ultimately enjoy. So how would I review this game?
Well, you could do far worse for five buckaroos.
