Space Giraffe gets Shorted in Review
A quick background on Space Giraffe, this is an Xbox Live Arcade game that is only going to run you 400 points ($5) and from the information I had of it, it seemed good. The game runs on an engine that will remind you of the old Atari game Tempest, shooting down enemies, however having that Geometry Wars type crazy colorful graphics flare. A basic game, but at the right cost, it is coming out Wednesday (22nd) and so we all can just try it for ourselves.
Now that you know what it is, here is the amusing news coming from a review of the game put out by the Official Xbox Magazine (#75). Senior Editor Dan Amrich can be quoted from the review as saying something as bad as “Actually made us angry when we played it.” He sites problems of the visibility of enemies vs the backgrounds and ends the review with “Just really bad. Lacks a single redeeming quality, and or it’s busted to varying degrees in its own design, quality or basic functionality. No gamer of any stripe should bother.” Ouch, what a negative nancy. I know that OXM doesn’t have to post only high scores for games just because of the name of the magazine, but man, I don’t recall ever seeing a score that low.
Thanks to some crazy Internet Matlockery, a user from the Yakyak forums was able to pull out some information on Dan Amrich, “..he has NO achievements at all for Space Giraffe. It’s really pretty hard to play SG for any length of time and get no achievements whatsoever; there are a few that are given out fairly easily by way of encouragement. Genius-boy here has managed to get none at all.
His score in interesting because it shows that he got 6.7 million at a maximum level of 31. To have such a small score for level 31 is pretty extraordinary. It basically means that the player must have just been scraping through one level at a time, just barely pushing the start level and accompanying start bonus over the threshold each time, and stubbornly refusing to actually play on earlier levels and actually, y’know, learn something. It’s a truly horrible way to play, a combination of idiocy and brute force that is spectacularly unrewarding.
A good player should be scoring 40 or 50 million by level 30″
Amusing stuff, to check a good review of the game, head over to TeamXbox, where the game gets a 6.75 out of 5, fairly opposite of Dan and then some. I now just can’t wait to play the game in two days just because of all this internet fuss.
November 24th, 2007 at 8:24 am
[...] Jeff Minter Hates Frogger…. Jeff Who?! by PacoDG Jeff Minter, creator of huge classics that I have no doubts no one has heard of, such as Attack of the Mutant Camels, Revenge of the Mutant Camels, and Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time (no, I made none of those titles up). His most recent endeavor, one that I had somewhat looked forward to, was the Xbox Live Arcade’s “Space Giraffe.” [...]