The definitive Space Giraffe thread

[DM2]

! now thats some score, I must remember not to add you to my friends list as it will make depressing reading

It'll still be on the main leaderboard.

I'll just have to shut my eyes then...

[NickMon]

only one thing for it "day of sick"

crap i keep dieing !!

[Yak]

I'M NUMBER 1!

That's cos Yak's not died yet Expect a 200mil score in an hour

That'll be 546,564,141 actually ...

[Darwin]

Aw man, this is sublime.

Congrats to Jeff and Giles.

As for everyone else, I'm on holiday all week, guess what I'll be doing.

Enjoy being at work everyone.

Level 7!?!?.....CUUNNTT!!

[Mayhem]

And all of a sudden the YakYak boards do seem rather lacking in activity

[PVB]

A further heads-up for TPTB:

Microsoft are still saying SG is 800 points:

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/s/space ... ivearcade/

Give someone a kick will you please?

[disciple]

Rev Stu says :

I'm planning a full review, but first impressions:

- I had a solid three-hour session as soon as I bought it, so it must have something going for it.

- It is, and I can't state this strongly enough, nothing like Tempest. It's clearly intended to be something a lot trancier and less arcadey. The pace overall is far slower and more thoughtful - it certainly reminds me of Rez in that respect.

- Aesthetically it's absolutely gorgeous. The music is perfectly suited, and the visuals, in their own right, are beautiful. As for how well they serve the gameplay, read on.

- I have, on the one hand, a lot of sympathy for the OXM reviewer. I've been playing Jeff's games for years, and I would estimate that roughly 9 out of every 10 deaths so far have been due to something I didn't see. (NB Not necessarily the same as was impossible to see.) Much of the time I have difficulty accurately identifying where my own ship is, never mind anything else. For experienced Minter fans this is hard going visually, much less clear and obvious than any of his other games - everyone else is just going to cry, and I think it's entirely fair for the reviewer to warn his fairly mainstream audience of how much they might hate this. Which is a lot.

- On the other hand I have no sympathy for him at all, because it took me barely 20 minutes to almost double his high score, so he evidently put very little effort into playing the game properly.

- Audio cues are significantly improved from Tempest 3000, which is just as well given how vital they are. Deaf people have absolutely no chance in Space Giraffe.

- While the tutorial does a decent job of grounding you in the basics, the game in general is very poorly explained. New enemies appear without warning and behave in odd and inconsistent ways (sometimes you can take them out with one shot, other times you can sit there and blast them for 10 seconds solid without apparently denting them), and the visual chaos is such that your chances of determining their behaviour by observation are minimal. (As with T3K, sometimes it's not even easy to determine if you've actually been killed or not.)

- Also, I still don't know what the rules are for setting a new starting bonus.

- It's annoying to not be allowed to use the d-pad for movement, since movement is only left and right. Personally I find it much simpler on webs that loop right round to instinctively know which way is "left" and which is "right" with a d-pad. Maybe just me on that one. (You can configure the controls, but not in such a way as to use the d-pad for anything.)

- I'm not a fan of the "hoof shots" controlled by the second analogue stick. They seem of very limited value, appear not to work at all on some levels, and require you to take your finger away from the Superzapper button.

- Conversely, the other core gameplay elements seem very well judged. The various mechanisms for building up your Power Zone give lots of scope for formulating tactics and strategies. It's very weird that (as far as I can see) there's no indicator of whether you have any jump pods or not, but then you can't really afford to take your eyes off the screen for a second anyway, so I daresay a readout would have been of limited use. Still a strange oversight, though.

- It really would have been a good idea to include a "crazy graphical shit off" option to help people get into the game. The learning curve here is a pretty intimidating one, and I suspect the majority of people will give up, recoiling in horror, very early on.

- It's pretty cunty of Jeff's boyfriend, who's been playing the game for about a year, to show up and effectively ruin the leaderboard for everyone else within two hours. As is at least one other member of the development team, and apparently Jeff is doing the same thing too. Fuck off, eh? We know you're just trying to prove a point, but we all believe you that it's possible to get high scores if you WROTE THE FUCKING THING, so stop spoiling everyone's fun.

So far: I like it, and will be playing it lots more to see if increasing experience overcomes some of the annoyances. But I can see that an awful lot of people really, really won't get on with it even a tiny bit. I'd expect a fair few of those 2s in any reader votes, alongside the 9s and 10s.

[Muttley]

Just curious - how many buttons does the game use? I'd guess two - fire and 'bull'?

Firing is automatic

[Sir_LANs-a-lot]

Preliminary observations

Marmite gaming though innit?

[phazey]

It's beautiful. Jeff & Giles, Thankyou very much.

unreliableBOX360 lasted long enough for me to play!

/me happy

[Yak]

Just curious - how many buttons does the game use? I'd guess two - fire and 'bull'?

Firing is automatic

yeah, automatic firs, you've Smart Bomb and Jump on the right side and "speed up transition" on the left trigger, although the latter las little effect on gameplay and is just a convenience for the player.

I suspect the Rev will feel differently about hoof shots when he realises how useful they are for taking out diagonally firing spiky cunts as soon as they appear. Especially the accelerated partially-aimed hoof shots you get after getting a Yes Yes Yes.

the level restart is easy. Ig you arrive on any level with 3 or more lives, it checks to see if that's your best score so far upon arriving there. If it is, that score is saved and becomes the level's Restart Bonus.

This bonus is awarded at the end of the level if you choose to start a game at that level. It's like Skill Step in tempest, but instead of being arbitrarily decided by the programmers, the start bonus given for any level is that set by the player. It's nice because if you fancy a quick game you can just go back in and try to push up the start bonuses on any levels you want. You can later use those increased start bonuses as the basis for a concerted score attack.

As for spoiling the leaderboard - hey, we are just showing what's possible. I am not certain that even my own hi-score will survive that long, since I am sure Sickers has it in his sights and he is fully capable of beating me. And in a few days there will surely be people all over the world with sufficient skill to challenge it. It points the way for now and illustrates what a decent score can be like but I fully expect it to be bested before too many days have passed.

[FrAgP1G]

Preliminary observations

Marmite gaming though innit?

Mmmmm...marmite on toast and a cup of tea........

[rockwaldo]

Chaps - I'm not convinced that this thread is a good one to make the "official" Space Giraffe one, wouldn't it be better for a nice clean fresh one?

EDIT - doh forget that bollocks, we have a whole seperate forum now dont we

[Anders]

Pretty much all of my deaths happen when I see a bullet coming and think "I'm sure I can I can get it in time... Argh!". I need to be less reckless, I guess.

[RiK]

I like marmite.