Results tagged “llamasoft” from The Gameshelf

You may have known (as I did) that Space Giraffe's eye-bending visuals resemble Neon, the Xbox 360's built-in music visualizer, because they come from the same creator. But perhaps you did not know (as I didn't until just now) that Neon is meant to be a fully interactive experience, whose manual can teach you how to use up to four Xbox controllers to influence the on-screen animation, with each one modifying a different attribute, including camera position, tunnel effects, and "boingy".

I mentioned Jeff Minter's Space Giraffe on here a while ago. It's been out as an Xbox Live Arcade title for over a year, and Minter's Llamasoft just ported it to the PC. To help promote this new release, Minter created some text-n-video walkthroughs of the game's early levels.

To me, this is most notable for being a complete - and completely correct - reversal of Minter's initial reaction to the game's critical reception, including the infamous "grow a pair" post on his company's blog, where he attacked the idea that modern video games should contain tutorials of any sort. It's too bad he left that sulky post up on the blog's front page for a whole year, but I am willing to overlook all in the face of this clear good-faith effort to show that he is, in fact, listening to his audience.

Personally, I love the crazy graphics that so many have complained about, but playing it still makes me frustrated. There's a point about a dozen levels in where I lose all my accumulated lives without the foggiest notion why. I know from my reading of the game's development history that the information's in there somewhere - part of the challenge is learning how to read all the colors and sound effects whizzing by. But the game doesn't make this challenge explicit, so unless you are taught from an external source, like a GameFAQ or these videos, as far as you know your giraffe simply becomes suicidal after ten minutes of play.

In this sense, the videos are rather an overdue patch to a deeper design flaw, but I'm nonetheless pleased that they've appeared. I look forward to absorbing these videos and attempting a renaissance with my own copy of the game. And in any case, I maintain that the Xbox version of Space Giraffe is totally worth five bucks. It's a game that deserves experiencing.

Last year I became interested in a notion of literary theory known as authorial intent. In a nutshell, it states that if there's a conflict between an author and their audience about the interpretation of a work, the audience wins. Put another way, an author's own statements about their work, when stated outside of the work itself, carry no more or less weight than those of any other well-informed reader. This I learned about after the controversy that arose after Ray Bradbury stated that his 1953 masterpiece Fahrenheit 451 was not at all about censorship, but was rather a critique of television's social effects. I found myself feeling so strongly about it that I became involved in a Wikipedia edit-skirmish over it, after certain individuals quickly marked up the book's article to indicate that decades of academic study regarding the work had become invalid overnight due to Bradbury's new words.

This came to mind again recently as I stumbled across the curious story of Space Giraffe while researching the market of XBox Live Arcade. To be honest, I'm not sure how correct it is to call this particular case another instance of an author's intent running contrary to that of the audience - in this case, the game's players - but it's close enough to warrant a comparison anyway.