Where to get it

Steam

2007 · LLamasoft · Indie · Shoot 'em up

Space Giraffe

Xbox console exclusive

Space Giraffe is an abstract action arcade style game that takes place in a succession of beautiful environments generated by an advanced graphics synthesizer. It presents itself as a shooter but the more you play the more you discover the hidden depths and strategies that make the gameplay satisfyingly rich and rewarding. This is the boldest evolution of the trance-shooter, created by the company that helped to define the genre with the groundbreaking Tempest 2000.

Released: 22 August 2007
Platforms: Windows Xbox 360
Genres: Indie Shoot 'em up
Developers: LLamasoft
Publishers: LLamasoft
Modes: Single-player
Country: United Kingdom
Age ratings: ESRB E CERO A
Languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese (Portugal), Spanish (Spain)

About

Space Giraffe is a fixed shooter video game developed and published by Llamasoft for the Xbox 360. Llamasoft released a version for Windows on 15 December 2008. It was made available on Steam on 19 March 2009.

Players say

Media

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Gameplay

Although the game is aesthetically similar to the arcade game Tempest, Minter has strongly denied that Space Giraffe is an update to Tempest, as it introduces significant gameplay changes.

The player controls the Space Giraffe as it moves around the outer rim of a 3-dimensional extruded surface. Enemies appear in notably greater quantities than in Tempest, beginning at the opposite end of the third dimension and approaching the player, firing bullets. The Giraffe can destroy these enemies by firing at them.

Development

The name "Space Giraffe" originated from Minter's posts on the Jeff Minter fan forum YakYak and on his blog in which he semi-seriously referred to the player's character in the game as resembling a giraffe. This immediately attracted calls from readers and forum posters that the entire game should be named Space Giraffe, and this was used as the working title for the game, and then adopted for the final release because by that time it had already been the subject of widespread publicity. Minter in an interview related:

...all over the place along with stories talking about 'Jeff Minter's new game Space Giraffe,' and in fact I rather liked that name, and so it's stuck. I don't think I need to call it anything other than Space Giraffe now, and indeed it's been so widely reported as such that I actually think it would be harmful to rename it now."

Reception

Reviews for Space Giraffe from both game critics and game players have been polarized. Jeff Minter has stated of the game, "It's like Marmite. You won't know unless you try."

The first published professional review of Space Giraffe came in Official Xbox Magazine's September 2007 issue. Dan Amrich ("OXM Dan") gave Space Giraffe a 2/10 rating, stating "You'll frequently die because you couldn't pick out the pulsating assassin from the warped playfield floating over the throbbing LSD nightmare that is the background, which makes this game uniquely aggravating." Minter has noted that the OXM review "basically spoiled our launch completely" stating that by the time more positive reviews came out the game was no longer getting promoted by Microsoft. OXM later named Space Giraffe the "Worst Game of the Year" for 2007 in March 2008.