The definitive Space Giraffe thread

[Dr Derek Doctors]

Obviously until I play the game I can't render a proper opinion myself

A little bit disingenuous that, aren't you the guy that started knocking Space Giraffe on the rllmuk forum as soon as it was announced?

Honestly, I have played the game and the criticisms that have been relayed from this piece don't stack up so far.

Oh yes, I am. But that was more about the whole Tempest/Space Giraffe similarity thing, and then later on about the videos looking unintelligable.

[gilesgoat]

Obviously until I play the game I can't render a proper opinion myself

A little bit disingenuous that, aren't you the guy that started knocking Space Giraffe on the rllmuk forum as soon as it was announced?

Honestly, I have played the game and the criticisms that have been relayed from this piece don't stack up so far.

Oh yes, I am. But that was more about the whole Tempest/Space Giraffe similarity thing, and then later on about the videos looking unintelligable.

Blame YouTube for their crap compression offered

[Dave]

A review is a statement of opinion, once you start thinking "What would Jesus do?" you're not doing your job properly.

But the publication is providing the review, not the reviewer. The reviewer has been given the duty to create a stateless, general review of something, and not sway the opinion of the entire publication to one extreme or another. That's not reviewing. It's editorializing.

There's a difference between a movie critic who analyzes a movie and formulates a review for the entire world to see, and someone who writes their opinion about the movie on Rotten Tomatoes. One comes from a professional who spends their life doing nothing but movies, while the other is an amateur who has an opinion, but not that life-long knowledge of what goes into making a good movie.

If the reviewer genuinely couldn't see the enemies once he got to a certain level then that's game-breaking. Imagine playing R-Type but you could only discern 10% of the bullets and the rest only appeared when they were a few inches from your craft? 2/10 would be *generous* in that situation.

Jeff's games are purposely inherently difficult to see, "unless" you're a skilled gamer who realizes that it's not all madness in there, but well thought out design and structure.

One can easily miss that structure if they don't give the game enough play time. And you do need to be a particular type of hardcore gamer to fully enjoy it too.

And as for all this "he obviously only took 5 minutes" stuff, perhaps you should read the review or email the chap and ask him before you all leap to that conclusion? Or is it okay for you to make snap judgements about someone's work?

All valid points. And you're right, reading the review and playing the game should be done before jumping to conclusions. Hopefully in a few weeks we'll all be playing and enjoying SG en-masses.

I think I'm coming more from the hard-to-believe camp more than anything. From Jeff/Giles reactions, to other peoples reactions who've played the game, to past mis-understandings of Jeff's work (T2K has too much stuff on the screen, hence is crap), and Llamasoft's history of putting out really good games, I'm just really skeptical.

[Yak]

The simple fact is, as I have already mentioned, the necessary cues *are* visible in-game or else everyone would have very similar scores due to random, unfair deaths.

This isn't the case; good SG players are plainly scoring far better than bad ones.

Therefore any deficiency isn't with the game, it's with the *reviewer* not being skilled enough to interpret the game. Since that skill is *part* of the game, complaining that such a skill is necessary at all is like whining because there are bullets in a shooter.

A score of 2 might be appropriate where a game is *actually* broken. But SG is far from being actually broken. For any reviewer simply to reflect his *own inability to play* in such a low score is - and this word keeps coming back in respect of this guy - simply incompetent.

[Sledge]

Or imagine a Resident Evil outing where some of the enemies were barely visible by design because the whole point of it was to pick them out and... oh wait, we've already had that and it was a great game. Not really sure things being tricky to spot necessarily indicates brokenness.

Aw heck, maybe the guy's colour-blind and it's an accessibility issue? Awaiting the text with interest.

Yes, you're right. Those dozen insect enemies in Resident Evil 4 are directly analogous to every single bullet in the later levels of the hypothetical R-Type varient I posited.

Really?! The point, quite obviously, is that we can all cherry pick examples to support just about any 'rules' we can think of. You, by your own admission just above, have no clue whether your R-Type bullet hypothesis is in any way analogous to the experience SG delivers.

[rockwaldo]

The key points for me here are:

1) he *is* allowed to dislike the game
2) Looking at their method for reviewing XBLA titles its all fucked anyway
3) It doesn't really matter - in fact, if anything it will make even MORE people download it to see what the tart is on about.

So it's all fine and dandy.

[Toastontoast]

I haven't read the review so I can't comment on it, and I haven't played the game so I can't contrast my own experiences with his.

Until I've done both those things, there's not really much to be said.

Edit - Strong, milky, three sugars thanks matt.

[Yak]

He is allowed to dislike it *publically and critically* if he can demonstrate to me a level of actual competence upon which to rationally base such a criticism.

I want to know what his gamertag is.

[Dr Derek Doctors]

Really?! The point, quite obviously, is that we can all cherry pick examples to support just about any 'rules' we can think of. You, by your own admission just above, have no clue whether your R-Type bullet hypothesis is in any way analogous to the experience SG delivers.

No, I was comparing it to what the reviewer stated as his experience of Space Giraffe.

And had ALL of RE4's enemies been like those insects from that period onwards? Then the game would have taken a SHARP downturn in my affections. A little bit of that sort of stuff, in the right environment to support it is fine.

[Mayhem]

For the record, I'm the kind of player who gets easily pissed off with unavoidable deaths, and it's honestly not something that SG suffers from. 99 times out of 100 I know *exactly* what killed me and that it was my judgement or dexterity that let me down.

Likewise actually...

At RV I'll admit there were a few times when playing SG that I couldn't quite figure out why I'd died. However quite a lot of times I knew I'd made a cock-up or a slightly bad judgement to go "bulling" and been snuffed out as a response.

In the end I determined that more playing would give me a better interpretation of judgement and just exactly what is what and what doth kill... or in other words the likelihood of dying without knowing why would decrease.

Or to conclude, if I'd played it as much as the testers have so far, I'd probably be in the same position as them. Or pretty much the comments Mark put from the EG forums. Or what Jeff's just put.

So if you've got what is not a steep learning curve but still something which takes a significant amount of time to understand and master, coupled with short timeframes to play, review and write... probably not so surprising that some reviews of the game are not going to be favourable.

Perhaps that an indication of the way many games go today, in line with general culture, that it has to be now, now, now... instant gratification and the so forth. That so many players seem to go through a game with a guide at the same time because they don't want to, shock horror, actually think about how to beat something (okay you can't do that with SG but these are just examples) but get past it first time.

SG isn't like that... the amount of games that actually challenge you and make you actually be GOOD at them continue to decrease...

[Dr Derek Doctors]

The simple fact is, as I have already mentioned, the necessary cues *are* visible in-game or else everyone would have very similar scores due to random, unfair deaths.

This isn't the case; good SG players are plainly scoring far better than bad ones.

Therefore any deficiency isn't with the game, it's with the *reviewer* not being skilled enough to interpret the game. Since that skill is *part* of the game, complaining that such a skill is necessary at all is like whining because there are bullets in a shooter.

Hmm, I agree with you to a point. But maybe for him he perceived the level of skill/perception required to play the game to be inhumanly high?

Certainly there are a lot of people who'd argue that Ninja Gaiden on the Xbox is a wonderful game. Personally, I loathe it for it's utterly unforgiving difficulty level, and if I were to review it that would be reflected in my mark.

[rockwaldo]

He is allowed to dislike it *publically and critically* if he can demonstrate to me a level of actual competence upon which to rationally base such a criticism.

I want to know what his gamertag is.

Well, he doesn't actually owe you anything at all. He's paid to give his opinion publically, even if it is a load of old tosh. I doubt he is lying when he says he had trouble playing the game, and his skill level doesn't need to qualify to any standard either.

As I say, its just critisism - you will get plenty of it I'm sure, but the name of the game is to be confident in what you have made and focus on the majority, which we are all sure will be positive.

Out of everything you've released over the years, Space Giraffe is probably going to be the most critisised purely because of the wider demographic and the general opinionated nature of the Xbox Live community.

You didnt make this game for them anyway - so who cares what they think?

[Yak]

The simple fact is, as I have already mentioned, the necessary cues *are* visible in-game or else everyone would have very similar scores due to random, unfair deaths.

This isn't the case; good SG players are plainly scoring far better than bad ones.

Therefore any deficiency isn't with the game, it's with the *reviewer* not being skilled enough to interpret the game. Since that skill is *part* of the game, complaining that such a skill is necessary at all is like whining because there are bullets in a shooter.

Hmm, I agree with you to a point. But maybe for him he perceived the level of skill/perception required to play the game to be inhumanly high?

Certainly there are a lot of people who'd argue that Ninja Gaiden on the Xbox is a wonderful game. Personally, I loathe it for it's utterly unforgiving difficulty level, and if I were to review it that would be reflected in my mark.

Yes, but landing a job as a game reviewer implies that one have a degree of competence. And really, SG is no Ikaruga in terms of difficulty. I actually dislike diff curves that are onerously steep at the outset.

We had all sorts playing the game during alpha and subsequent test and if it weren't possible to see the enemies then I'd've heard about it and the scores would've reflected the truth of it. But everyone actually had a good time and the game was universally perceived to be fair. I did have a few people say that it took a few goes to get into it at first, but that once past that it was fine.

So do I believe all those people were wrong and/or deluded, or that mateyboy at OXM never bothered to progress past the few goes necessary to acclimatise?

Occam's razor would lead me to conclude the latter.

[Sledge]

Really?! The point, quite obviously, is that we can all cherry pick examples to support just about any 'rules' we can think of. You, by your own admission just above, have no clue whether your R-Type bullet hypothesis is in any way analogous to the experience SG delivers.

No, I was comparing it to what the reviewer stated as his experience of Space Giraffe.

Sure Doc, but we don't know any of the detail of the reviewer's experience (do we? I didn't miss something again did I?) The bullets being 'difficult to see' might well mean they pop out of nowhere inches in front of you (as in your analogy), but I'd bet it's more a case of having to attune yourself to how the information is presented and learn to decipher it (as in mine). But anyway, we shouldn't argue in front of the fluffies.

[gilesgoat]

I think that "a fundamental problem" of all this is the following, especially
with XBLA where everyone knows that "it's possible to download a demo
and see it by yourself".

- people thinks that reviewers seen "lot of games" and know how to rate a game

- XBLA has "the demo" so it's clear that you tried "the real thing" not
that you just saw some screenshots and/or read a "game script".

You'd expect an XBLA review to be "quite accurate" given that you
had a good sample of the thing.

Now, another thing is in fact that here we are discussing about "a number
thrown there" about a review that no one have seen and that it won't
come out that in a couple of months or so.

And a weird thing is exactly that, in throwing out a thing like "2" you
make me think "this thing is SO shite why should I care to even read
a review that will come out 2 months later to explain me it's shite".

To be fair then, they should NOT publish/give out any number if NOT
CONTEMPORARY at the review text, in this case it would be lot better
because at least you are saying "I am giving 2 because I think .. ".

Now you see a '2' a lot of people are going to think "this must be bloody shite" .. and it's sad really because you'd expect a "more technical" thing from a reviewer.

Thing is .. 2 out of 10 .. it's really harsh .. I would have understood
better a '5' or '4' and think "this man understand nothing of this game"
( but someone else will understand it better ) 2 I consider it really a kind of insult because "even if you understand nothing" it's not SO bad to be "unplayable".

I mean .. I think anyone can do the first 6 ..7 levels without much effort.

Whoever reviewed SG in this case definitely had to be someone "totally NOT
into this gender of gaming".

Anyway .. one thing is sure, I'll never buy a copy of OXM for the rest of my life

And for all the games, as I usually do, I apply "my rule" "watch and judge
by yourself", magazines are just a waste of money but if they have good
pictures they can be some fun to read in the loo

In that case MLP Magazine is still better than that

Besides honestly I can't remember last time I bought a magazine ..

I think the last one ( computer speaking ) I bought was really Zzap
and QL Users .. then for a while it was Scientific American .. then I
think that maybe was the last one ..

Too crap nowadays, and the paper is not even good to lit the barbecue, it
does not ignite well