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Underground > Games & Gameplay >

Space Giraffe

  
 
Spatula Clarke
15:35 / 26.08.07
Hello Barbelimp. All saggy and floppy. Poor little Barbelimp

This, I fear, will be the last message I leave to you. Edward left to look for rations last night and hasn’t been seen or heard from since. Sarah’s wound has been irritating her again today and I can’t rule out the possibility that it may have become infected – G__ only knows what parasites that thing may have been host to. The child… it cries constantly. I wish I could comfort it, but I still dare not approach its room.

Night is drawing in now. The noises from outside begin again. Sarah looks at me pleadingly at times – I fear that she knows that I withheld some ammunition from Nathaniel when he left with the remaining members of the team. It remains my fervent hope that she passes naturally before the painkillers wear off. As great as my love for her is, I cannot bring myself to do… that thing. The child will, I’m certain, be able to look after itself. Sometimes when it looks at me, I swear there's a glint of strange intelligence in its eyes.

Space Giraffe - new game from Jeff Minter, he of Attack of te Mutant Camels, Gridrunner and Tempest 2000 fame - just came out on the Xbox 360 on Wednesday, via its online download service, and could well be the most important game of the year so far.

First, though, we're going to have a little history lesson, because the history here is important for understanding the game, its creator and the reaction that it's received over the last couple of days.

This is Tempest:



Tempest was an Atari game created by Dave Theurer and released in 1981. I remembered some of that off the top of my head, so I did. Unlike a lot of really excellent games released around the same period of time - Defender and Robotron 2084, for example - Tempest never really seemed to click with the majority of arcade-goers and was allowed to disappear into obscurity. The highly abstract visuals are going to be a reason for that, but so's the unique gameplay.

To explain the screen above: You're the yellow inverted-C thing that you can see towards the bottom right of the screen. The blue vectors combine to make what's known as the web. Everything else is an enemy. You navigate left and right around the outside rim of the web and shoot at the enemies travelling up it, towards you.

Those red enemies are flippers. If a flipper reaches the rim of the web, you're fucked - it'll move around it until it gets to you, and contact with a flipper means death. The basic idea, therefore, is to circle around the web making sure that you destroy everything coming your way before it reaches the rim. Different enemy types require different tactics, but the general idea is the same. When you clear a level, you're taken to a new web with a new shape and have to repeat the process. The purpose of the game = high scores.

Let's look at that screenshot. Go on, really wrap yr peepers around it. That's one fucking weird looking game, yes? Yes. That's important. We'll come back to that. It's also a look that is *perfect* for the gameplay.

It's remarlably difficult to give an accurate representation of depth on a flat monitor or tv screen, and that makes games where things are coming out of the screen towards you equally difficult to play. As technology's improved, the means of displaying depth have become more sophisticated and gained a more natural look - starting with Sega's classic Space Harrier, which used the firm's Super Scaler technology to alter the size of sprites (2D objects, basically) as they 'approach' the player, and moving on to where we are today with polygon models, depth cueing and all of that stuff that isn't half as funky as something called Super Scaler, but does the job.

None of that was available to Theurer. So what he did was design the web as an abstract representation of depth. The web doesn't *really* go back into the screen and its inhabitants don't really travel up it, but look at that screenshot and the illusion is absolutely perfect.

Anyway, that's Tempest.

This is Jeff Minter. Minter's one of the few remaining guys from the British bedroom coding scene of the mid to late 1980s - a contemporary of people like Matthew Smith and Tony Crowther, the guys who were pumping out some seriously imaginative titles for home computers. Minter's the only one of that group I can think of who hasn't either disappeared off the face of the planet or become just another name that flies past in games' credit rolls.

The reason for that is that he's pretty much become seen as an auteur - arguably the only one that British games design has. He's the only person to have managed to stay in 'bedroom coder' mode - creating and releasing the games that he wants to play and that he enjoys creating on hardware that he considers interesting.

That, plus he lives on a plot of land in wales where he keeps a variety of livestock, all named and all part of the family. They tend to either appear in his games or are paid homage to by them. Minter himself is popularly known as Yak.

When Atari were looking for people to create launch software for their Jaguar console - their ill-fated attempt to take a share of the market back from Nintendo and Sega - Minter got involved. There was a decent interview with him about it in Edge a couple of years ago, but they don't appear to have it archived on their site - somebody's typed it up here, though.

Oh. Suddenly, there's no sound from the child's room. I feel a queer prickling of my skin - static electricity? Damn me for a coward, but the shadows cast by the candlelight have taken on a life of their own. My imagination runs wild and I swear I can hear whispering from outside. I go now, to be with Sarah. Should I see the night through, I'll return to continue this final correspondence during the daylight.
 
 
Elijah, Freelance Rabbi
16:07 / 26.08.07
Post apocalyptic game reviews?
 
 
Spatula Clarke
12:35 / 27.08.07
Inspired by the utter futility of trying to discuss anything on this board that hasn't already received an insane amount of hype. It's like G&G is the opposite of everything that used to be great about FTV&T and Music - the feeling that you were going to be introduced to something new and exciting, that there were people around who wanted to know about stuff that they might have missed out on because it'd been lost in the wave of publicity for bigger, blander fare.

Yeah. So, Tempest 2000. Had a big post typed up on it last night and then Firefox crashed, pretended that it hadn't and neglected to give me the option to restore the previous session. Great.



The best way to find out about Tempest 2000 is to play it. Now, you can head over to eBay and pick up a Jaguar, with some games, for about £15. I recommend that course of action, because nothing beats playing a game in the way that it was designed to be played, on the correct hardware with the correct controller. If you've not got the space under your telly for another console, though, the Project Tempest emulator runs the game perfectly. Game ROM itself available from the usual suspects. Unzip the game ROM, place it somewhere you'll be able to find it again, run the emulator and load the game.

What Minter did with Tempest 2000 was turn everything up to 11. The web gets filled in with beautiful, glistening colours (the shading effects were fairly revolutionary in terms of the kind of thing you could expect a games console to pump out). You get a bunch of powerups for the Claw - your craft - that include the essential Jump (allowing you to slip out of tricky situations should a couple of enemies make it to the rim of the web), an AI droid that'll take on some enemies for you and the Superzapper, a smart bomb that wipes out everything on the screen. The sound effects remain some of the most memorable in the medium - the cracking egg effect of a certain enemy being shot, the helium-voiced Yes! Yes! Yes!, the sinister "Excellent" on successfully making it all the way through a bonus stage.

It's what Minter was making the Jag hardware do in terms of those visuals that really makes the game what it is, though. While everybody else was chasing the 3D dream, he took another route and made the machine pump out all of these unique pixel and bitmap effects. The way that the title and Game Over screens mirror themselves and slosh around (he mentions in the interview linked to in my last post how this effect was too sluggish to include in the game proper, but if you play it through emulation - and your PC is up to the task - it goes super-fast and super-silky. The game itself runs at the perfect speed, mind). The way that the background starfield speeds up and patterns emerge in it during the transition from one level to the next. The way that text can wobble around or break up and zoom into your face. Nobody else ever released a game that had these effects - it's still unique.

And the bonus rounds. The bonus rounds in T2K are notoriously trippy and hypnotising. The first of them has you steering a crosshair through targets. The second places you in a tunnel and asks you to keep on the path marked out. I can't remember what the third is, sorry, other than that it's even more whacked-out than the others. They sound like they'd be basic, dull, but the way that the movement is handled in them - there's a lot of low-gravity inertia, which makes them feel strangely dreamlike - combined with the tripped--out soundtrack and ultra-abstract visuals (the comparison with the stargate sequence in Kubrick's 2001 is valid) makes them really amazing experiences. They feel like they should - like rewards. You want to get to the next to see what it's like, or just to experience it again, and you're gutted if you don't get the opportunity.

T2K is now, of course, a cult favourite. I bought it when shops were selling off their Jag stock, with the console, for about £40. Worth every penny. It's still the only game I own for the machine (well, there's the pack-in one too, but that's terrible) and it still gets played to this day. Even with those awful controllers.

Got a link to a nice demonstration of the game on YouTube around here somewhere, but the site's timing out on me atm. Will post it later.

Remarkably difficult to find a decent T2K page on the web, so here's the Wikipedia entry instead.

T2K got ported across to the PC, Saturn and PlayStation. The PC version is nasty, imo - loses all of the funky visual effects, has inferior music. Steer clear. The Saturn version is nice enough, but the visual effects are, again, toned down (only slightly this time, but still noticably), the music's remixed into something that doesn't sound as good and the sound effects are re-recorded and lose a lot of their spooky otherness in the process. The PS1 version is the same, but different. Next post.
 
 
COG
13:15 / 27.08.07
Tempest in an arcade in Cornwall was one of my defining video game moments. Maybe that and asteroids are what hooked me in all those years ago. I had played Space Invaders of course, and a bunch of others, but these two seemed to match the way my brain worked. Or maybe these games moulded it to the way it is now.

Interesting that the designer of Tempest also did Missile Command, another of my favourites that felt more terrifying to me than the actual threat of nuclear war. Something about the futility. A lot of the games of that period had that structure where the moment of being overwhelmed was inevitable, but Missile Command seemed to tweak the fear up a notch somehow.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
13:34 / 27.08.07
The PS1 version was called Tempest X3 and was a remix of T2K, this time not created by Minter. It's a cool thing - almost as good as T2K, but the same changes that were made to the audio in the Saturn version are present here and there are some there other alterations that fiddle with the gameplay. Visually, however, it's been created with the new host platform's specific abilities in mind, so you now get a wonderfully oily web, snazzy light-sourcing on your shots (so the web lanes light up as your shots travel down them) and a load of the transparency effects that were so stunning when the PS1 first appeared.

What isn't so stunning is that they made no effort with the bonus stages, just ripping them direct from T2K. Missed opportunity, made worse by the fact that they're not as much fun to play as they are on T2K - the movement, the sense of intertia hasn't been carried across properly, which robs them of that dreamlike feel.

A straight conversion of T2K is hidden away as an unlockable extra, iirc. It's years since I last dug this out for a play.

Minter's own review of TX3
I dislike this guy, but there are some juicy screenshots here

Oh, YouTube's working again.

T2K
TX3
 
 
Spatula Clarke
14:12 / 27.08.07
Minter would then go on to create another of his own updates to the franchise, Tempest 3000. Want to play it? Tough shit. It was made for Nuon, which wasn't even a games machine - it was games-enabled DVD player technology. It didn't take off. DVD players containing Nuon tech are virtually impossible to get hold of - they pop up on eBay rarely, but tend to fetch high prices. The Nuon players that actually mentioned their games-enabled abilities never reached Europe, either. Some Nuon players don't even have ports for the game controllers.

Edge gave T3K a 9/10 review on release. It's one game that I really want to play, but suspect I never will.

Gameplay video. So beautiful.

A few years ago, Minter got involved with Peter Molyneux. He wanted to create a game for the GameCube and Molyneux decided to back him - Lionhead funded Minter's experiments with the machine, Molyneux saying in interviews that he was happy just to let Minter get on with stuff at his own pace, because he knew that whatever came out at the end would be well worth it. The project was known as Unity. It never gelled into a complete game - the then-current version of VLM was up and running, there was apparently the ability for a second player to pick up a pad and manipulate the VLM elements running in the background of the game in real-time while the first player was actually playing the thing, but it eventually got cancelled. Just to a casual observer, it always had the feeling that Minter had created this beautiful environment, but was struggling to create a game to fit into it. The piss-poor software support for the Cube in its later years would also have affected the decision, I'd imagine.

Then Microsoft bought Lionhead. I was hoping at the time that it might mean that we got some Minter action on the 360.

Break for the sake of readability. Is that a word? It is now.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
15:02 / 27.08.07
So, Space Giraffe.

Space Giraffe is Minter's latest game, created in partnership with his Llamasoft colleague Ivan Zorzin. It was released this last Wednesday on the 360's Live Arcade download service for 400 points, which equates to about £3.20, I think.

Let me say that again. £3.20.

This is Space Giraffe.











If you own a 360, you already have access to an element of Space Giraffe. Stick a music CD in the drive. See the visualiser? That's Neon, the latest iteration of Minter's constantly evolving Virtual Light Machine project. A light synthesiser - the patterns throb, swell, adapt in time with whatever sound you've got them tied into. Neon's the base for SG.





Neon's lovely. Nobody ever talks about it. Millions of people own it.

Anyway, Space Giraffe. You can see the basics of Tempest in them there screenshots - there's a web, there are enemies travelling up the web, there's an evolution of the Claw. And yeah, you shoot stuff travelleing up the web.

What Minter's done with SG, though, is take that Tempest formula and mix in a load of high-level scoring techniques.

The first and most important is 'bulling' - physically barging enemies off the rim of the web. When you shoot an enemy, the web extends - if you look at that third screenshot down, you can see that the yellow lines marking out each lane only stretch out a small distance. Shoot an enemy and they'll stretch further. Don't shoot any enemies for a while and they'll retract right back. That's the Power Zone. When the PZ is extended, you can bull enemies on the rim of the web - knock into them - for big points and, if you kill a bunch of them in one run, a score multiplier. If you knock into an enemy when the PZ has retracted all the way back, you'll die.

Another scoring technique is playing tennis with enemy shots. Shoot an enemy bullet that's travelling up the web and it'll bounce back into the screen. Keep on bouncing them back and at the end of the level you'll collect them for extra points.

Those are the basics. You can fill the PZ with other methods - jumping fills it a little way, but unlike T2K you're now limited in the number of jumps you can perform by the number of powerup pods that you've collected. The Superzapper (now the Sheepiezapper) also refills it slightly, but you can only use that once per life per level.

But forget about that for now and just look at the thing. Just Like T2K at the time of its release, there's no other game that's ever looked like this. Because it's the sound-responsive VLM running the backgrounds, they pulse and explode in time with the music. Because the game runs off the 360's hard drive, you can put a music CD of your own choosing into the drive and watch as the game's visuals respond to it - so far, I've found that anything by Aphex Twin works perfectly, as does early, pre-advertising exec sell-out drum & bass. None of this is surprising, as Minter's an Aphex fan.

But that's not all that the visuals do. Certain enemies fuck your vision up big-time. There are these things called Feedback Monsters - shoot them and they throw the scene into a flourescent negative for a split second, which causes mayhem if you're taking out a load of them in a row. There are spinner... things, that force the web to spin around if you don't shoot them fast enough.

And even when you're not killing things, it can all go mental. An early level coats the graphics in a layer of sloppy jelly stuff, anything that moves leaving trails in it. One level in the mid-20s forces you to see it through a fish-eye lens effect, the ends of the straight web it contains zooming into your vision when you move to them, the centre doing the opposite. A level in the mid-50s that I reached last night screws with your perception, initially making you think that you Giraffe is now placed at the far end of the web and the enemies are moving down it, into the screen - you're not and they're not, but it takes a conscious effort of will to get your eyes and brain to accept that fact.

All of this has led to the game being slammed in certain quarters. See the comment in the abstract about very stupid people. Common complaints are "it gives me a headache" (I call bullshit on this as a stupid overstatement of fact, and Minter himself has responded to it rather brilliantly by linking, in one discussion, to this) and "I can't tell what's going on".

(And those are the more sensible of the complaints - one guy on the SHMUPS forum is a member of a closed development community message board, where other developers have apparently been coming out with classics like "I might play it if it got rid of the trippy shit and had silver metal enemies and bombs that looked like bombs and stuff" - really, what hope is there for this medium if these are the people shaping its future?)

The latter of those complaints is the interesting one, mainly because of the way that it's been handled by both Minter and Zorzin, and some of the comments from others involved with its development. On the Llamasoft blog, Minter quotes one of the testers:

If you move without seeing, you will die. If you see without listening, you will die. If you listen without feeling, you will die. Learning to see, listen & feel the game a player is rewarded with a very beautiful and special experience that we haven’t experienced in videogames for a long time; the whole of Space Giraffe is more than the sum of its parts.

The latest entry also points to this review. This is the important part, imo:

… yes, it’s often hard to see things. You’ll often get killed by bullets you couldn’t see through the flashing background colors, and sometimes you won’t even know where your Giraffe is. Usually that’s the sign of a bad game. This time, though, it is a major part of the point. As you proceed through the levels, the enemies not only get more numerous, faster, and more devious, but the game also pushes you deeper into the land of warped perception, and then demands that you see through that. Well, often you can’t. At first. And then you start to see the patterns, and then you break through, and then you are sailing through this batch of levels, dancing the whole time. This game is about expanding your perception. It demands that you learn to see. Most of the reviewers who gave the game low scores, I claim, were too closed-minded; they weren’t receptive to this kind of teaching, which the game is obviously telling you it wants to do, if you are quiet enough and listen.

"Learn to see". I love that idea. There are things that games can do, that they should do, that other media can't. One of those things is fuxx0ring your senses, then allowing you to learn how to use them in an entirely new and exciting way. If you want to get good at Space Giraffe, you need to see with your ears, hear with your eyes. That core idea is the perfect companion to the Virtual Light Machine, a bit of software that works as a visual representation of sound. It's an idea that I think any right-minded person, and certainly anybody who believes that Barbelith is for them, should be hugely excited by and interested in. It's also an idea that's as far-removed from the overwhelming majority of commercially-released videogames as it's possible to get. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Minter and Zorzin - and Zorzin's part in the development of Minter's ideas into fully-fledged psychedelic experiences can't be overstated - are true visionaries.

Which makes the general reception that the game's received enormously frustrating, if not exactly unexpected. The pair were surprisingly upbeat about it last week, probably because those who've *got* the game have totally got it, and have been pretty vocal in their support of it. Not vocal enough, mind, hence this thread.

Unfortunately, their posts to the YakYak forum today have expressed depression and exhaustion. A couple of bugs have come to light since release, the game's not sold particularly well, they apparently might have to put any bug fix through Mircosoft's certification process again and give MS some cash for the pleasure.

So basically, Barbelith, what I'm saying is that anybody here who owns a 360 has no excuse not to get this game. If you've not got a Gold Live membership, you can still go online with the console, grab a free Silver one - all it requires is a Hotmail account - and only pay the £3.20 for this one game.

£3.20. Quite frankly, I'll give up on this entire forum if there's no interest in this. You should be supporting small developers anyway, but you should definitely be supporting small developers who make games as exceptional, as imaginative, as far-sighted and as revolutionary as this one. It feels a bit like a tipping point, really - if Minter goes, who've we got left who has this kind of vision twinned with the ability to get it officially published on a popular format? Nobody.

Decent recent interview

As far as I'm concerned, this is the best game on the console.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
21:34 / 27.08.07
Sorry COG, missed your post.

I'd heard of Tempest and had a vague idea of how it played, but it wasn't until T2K that I really got to know more about it. Even then it wasn't until TX3 came out that I actually played the thing.

Missile Command definitely pushes the Cold War buttons pretty explicitly - all the defend the cities business. it's interesting - Atari (which presumably means Infogrammes still, unless somebody else has bought the rights to the name now) have remixed Missile Command (and Centipede and Millipede) for Xbox Live Arcade just recently, and have obviously tried to copy what Minter did for Tempest back in the 90s. Splashes of lurid colour everywhere, techno soundtrack. It doesn't really work, because they've ultimately failed to realise that Minter updated the mechanics of the gameplay to the same extent that he did the visuals, and the end result is that the games come off looking cheap and slightly desperate. Missile Command comes off better than Centipede and Millipede, at least, mainly because it's aged better than either of those in the first place.

I, Robot is Theurer's otehr big Atari title. I've played it in emulation only a couple of times. Hell if I can remember what you do in it. I need to rectify that - it's uber-cult, barely anybody seems to know about it, yet it's classed as another title of seriously original vision by those who do. First game to use filled polygons, afaik, first game to include a 'downtime' mode for messing around in.
 
 
Elijah, Freelance Rabbi
02:40 / 28.08.07
I will, fingers crossed, have a 360 by the end of the week. I assume this thing is available to US 360 owners as well? I hadn't heard of it until now, for the money seems like a good choice.
 
 
Thorn Davis
07:57 / 28.08.07
There was a really enthusiastic review of this on gamespot the other week, which piqued my interest and for £3.50 I think this may have pushed me over the edge.

Towards the end of the last gen there was a lot of talk - in G+G and elsewhere on the web - of this kind of innovative, unusual game dying out in the face of Tom Clancy franchises and standard genre games, but Live actually seems to be a platform that could bring these games to a even wider audience, beyond the PC enthusiasts. Immediately as I saw the review of Space Giraffe I thought - Yeah, That's the kind of thing Live is for. I hope this kind of thing keeps coming. I'm not consistently disgusted with mainstream games in the way Wang is, but these more off the wall games do sit alongside the mega-selling franchise fare quite well.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
20:53 / 28.08.07
I was amazed to see it get such a glowing review from Gamespot and even more to see that the review itself was so fair-minded.

It's not that I'm "consistently disgusted" by mainstream gaming, not at all. It might seem that way due to the way that titles I pick out for thread-worthiness around these parts are sort of cultish things, but that's more about me believing that those are the things that your energy is best spent letting people know about - Barbelith games people will know about the big name titles, but they won't know about the more obscure ones, the ones that need and deserve to be shouted about.

This fits that bill, and then some. I'm not even slightly kidding when I say I currently believe it to be the best game on the machine. Somebody elsewhere was saying that SG cements Minter's position as videogames' own Lynch - I can see it, because it demonstrates an understanding of the possibilities of the medium that nobody else is even aware of, let alone attempting to approach.

And playing it makes the uninitiated go through a lot of the same reactions that they do when they watch certain Lynch films:

First time around = What the fucking hell is this? What a load of unintelligible bollocks.

Second time around = Ah, I think I get it now. Yeah, see, what's happening is there's thOH MY GOD YOU FUCK YOU CAN'T DO THAT TO ME I THOUGHT WE WERE REACHING AN UNDERSTANDING AND THEN YOU WENT AND PISSED UP MY NOSE

Third time around - This is shitdamn awesome.

That's if they're prepared to stick with it for the third time. And again, the Lynch link - you need to experience it in a full-on rush of confusion first time around, because that makes what happens when you finally tune into its wavelength - which itself is only something that happens if you're prepared to spend time thinking about and analysing it - even more shitdamn awesome.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
20:58 / 28.08.07
Sorry Elijah. Yeah, it's also on the US Marketplace.
 
 
Thorn Davis
07:51 / 30.08.07
I downloaded this last night, and have to say that I have some sympathy with the OXM reviewer that gave it 2 out of ten. If I was on the magazine and told to review this, without really knowing much about it, tired, up against a deadline and not really interested in the game, I think I would have found it a ridiculous, frustrating experience. If it weren't for the debate surrounding it, I can't see that I would have perservered, and I'm still at a loss at how to use the audio cues to decipher what's going on/ what's about to happen.

There's parts of presentation that kind of irritated me, too. Not the psychedelia, just the use of stupid internet tropes like "Oh, Noes!", the presence of recycled comedy catchphrases and - most grating of all - a constant repeated gag about poorly translated games that crops up at the end of every single level. It's like having an annoying student in an All Youre Base Are Belong To Us t-shirt braying Monty Python catchphrases in your face. The unimaginitively wacky nonsense revolving around the animals is a bit tiresome, also.

Nonetheless, I found myself thinking about it after I went to bed and wound up getting up to give it another spin, starting to make sense of the particular moves; letting enemies collect at the end of the web and then jumping to extend the web and battering them all off the edge. Already I'm impressed by the simple/clever variety in design of the various levels and the sudden disorienting shifts in controls in the levels that have you swooping upside down, meaning left is suddenly right, and I'm looking forward to getting stuck in again. So it feels like something special is starting to emerge.

I'm slightly resistant to the idea of it as the most important videogame of this generation, partly I think because I mainly got into gaming as a new form of narrative fiction - I tend to play games in order to make progress through a story and have never been taken with high-scores as a motivating factor. I've never really been into shmups either, which I suppose is what Space Giraffe appears to resemble. It's definitely unusual, though, which forms a major part of its appeal.
 
 
Freaky Drunk
12:30 / 30.08.07
I don't really see the appeal of this game. I've played it too briefly, admittedly, and will give it more of a chance later. But this talk of the game's "importance"? Where is this coming from? Sure, Minter is doing weird things with graphics and sound but so what? From my time with it there was nothing I hadn't really seen before in one form or another. Using audio cues to direct players? A shooter where you need to learn patterns to get further? Where is the innovation here? I don't see how this advances games as a medium.

From descriptions it just sounds like he took tempest, threw in a few complications to the game mechanic and dicked around with the graphics. What is new here? What am I missing?
 
 
Spatula Clarke
16:19 / 30.08.07
The rest of the thread?

I don't really know how else to explain it, other than the ways I already have.

The patterns here - they're not patterns. That's a poor choice of words from that reviewer. The only patterns are ones that emerge naturally as a result of your behaviour as the player. Enemies react in certain ways to certain actions, but they don't appear or move on the screen in pre-defined sequences that stay the same every time.

Yeah. Dunno what else to say in reply to that. Find the entire post pretty depressing, really. If all you've taken from this thread is "he's dicked around with the graphics", then it seems like a bit of a waste of time.

Thorn:

I'm slightly resistant to the idea of it as the most important videogame of this generation, partly I think because I mainly got into gaming as a new form of narrative fiction - I tend to play games in order to make progress through a story and have never been taken with high-scores as a motivating factor.

Oh, yeah. I mean, there's *no* narrative here - there's not even a nonsense one to fill the space. The thing about high scores, though, is that they're only ever part of the motivation for playing a game like this - or any decent game that they form a part of. They're a personal marker - here is where you were last time, this is how much you've improved. And in this case, it's saying "this is how much more in tune with everything you've become since last time". That's how zone games work - challening yourself, while also sort of... becoming a part of the game, learning to speak its language.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
16:32 / 30.08.07
Sorry. Double.

I can see why it'd be difficult to get the appeal if you're primarily interested in narrative, too. It's asking a lot, that shift in attitude from where it's all about the medium as a device for telling a story to a place where there simply isn't a story and it's all about the kind of subliminal reinforcement of reactions to specific prompts. They used to call it 'twitch gaming', which I've always thought is a slightly sniffy way of looking at it. Like it's no more than one of those tests they do with pidgeons - two buttons, one releases food, the other does nothing. Learning by repetition. It's far more than that.

Like I say, it's forming a direct link with the game - getting right onto its wavelength, where you're still thinking, but in slow time. Like when you fall over, time goes gloopy. Same here - you're playing this game that casual onlookers can't make head or tail of, and you're in this place where you're having no trouble with it - you're parsing the information faster than they are because you've gained this instinctive understanding of how to interpret it.

And that's why we're talking about *far* more than just dicked-about-with visuals or simple audio cues. Because sometimes in this game, the mix shifts and those things change, or something extra's suddenly thrown in over the top and unless you've got to that place where you're tuned in, the new element's going to throw you out. Whereas if you're in that place, you've almost subconsciously read through all of the feedback and replied to the signal, and learned something new about that signal in the process - how the accent has changed as a result of the feedback, maybe, or how to time your actions so that you only cause the feedback to kick in at a moment of your own choosing.

I've not properly read through this post yet (and it may well show), but I don't think *any* of this applies to games where the narrative is the main concern.

The best way of learning is doing, but if you're still not sure what's happening with certain enemy types, or how different elements of the gameplay interact with each other, there's a lot of stuff on the YakYak forum and a fairly decent (unfinished) faq on Gamefaqs (can't direct link to them, sorry, but it's easy enough to find).
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
16:36 / 30.08.07
Oooh... new Minter game... this could be the kick up the ass I need to sort Xbox Live out, really.

My personal favourite of his games has to be Llamatron 2112 on the Amiga. Fucking psychedelic shmup genius, that was.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
17:07 / 30.08.07
Ah, I was wondering where you were, Stoatie - thought that you'd probably had some exposure to Llamasoft in the past and can certainly see you as understanding Minter's very particular appeal.

I'm going to go back to this Tempest thing again, 'cause it's going around in my head now. The reason I went into that detail to begin with was because I figured it was the easiest way to explain where the basic mechanics for this game had come from. But actually trying to compare it to Tempest... well, of course you can do that, but it's like comparing Doom to Bioshock. Both share a perspective, both ask you to do roughly the same thing for roughly the same reason, but if you were to say that Bioshock is just Doom with different pictures, you'd be laughed out of the room. And rightly so. So, Tempest and SG share a perspective. They share a common goal and the first step in what you're doing is the same in both. But that's it - SG is way more than Tempest, and way more than a Tempest sequel.

Even R-Type and Gradius aren't just the same game with slightly different mechanics, after all. It's about how those differences in the face-value stuff conspire to alter the entire atmosphere and personal experience of the games.

The in-jokes - again, yeah, I can get that. I understand how those might be offputting. They blend into the background almost immediately once you're into the game, though - I know about ten of the level names, recognise most of the levels by the shape of the web instead. There isn't all that much animal stuff in there, anyway - your craft, the title screen, the smart bomb. And I'd not even noticed the Oh Noes yet. Consider it to be an extension of the visual feedback thing, if it really bothers you - something to use as a gauge to indicate whether or not you've had that 'zone' experience.

Thorn> I'm going to start a new thread to discuss the whole thing of XBLA and other digital distribution services, the claims made for them as avenues for small teams to get unusual games published.
 
 
netbanshee
18:39 / 15.09.07
Heheh... just done watching some Space Giraffe vid on youtube. Looks lovely. A Winner is You! That's certainly true for the price of admission.

It's great to see that games such as these can be found on XBLA. So many more potential players for these kinds of titles now that you can find them on platforms that have a large user base, a ridiculously low price and a simple download.

I hadn't paid any attention to SG since I don't have a 360 at home. I didn't realize that this was a Minter game either.

With titles such as SG, Rez HD and Every Extend Extra Extreme being released on the 360, it might be time to make my decision on a next gen console. Either that or start showing up at my friend's house with gamer points in hand.
 
 
nedrichards is confused
11:09 / 20.09.07
Another point re: Importance. I don't know if this is new or not, but it's certainly new to me but the way the score attack works where your best 'start bonus' is saved at the beginning of the next level so you can carry on there if you wish is just a deliciously moreish treat. Couple that with the death graph that you get that compares you against a 'good' score throughout all the levels and you get the sense that this time, the game is on your side.

I am actively terrible at Shmups, despite following Minter's carreer since the Atari ST and Revenge of the Mutant Camels, witness my top Geometary Wars score at around 100k. It's not that this game is easy, it's not, it's just that it's not difficult on the usual axes of twitch response speed and pattern memorisation. Yes, you have to know, or discover techniques to defeat enemies or stay alive (using the right stick hoof shots to sweep ahead of your movement to knock any bullets or flowers out of the way is essential) but it's something to do with the perfect chunking of levels or the differing challenges posed by each level, even the few seconds of flying around each web you get to orient yourself before the enemies arrive.

It's just very enjoyable to play. I know i'm only on a pathetic level 20-odd so far with a 6 million score but you don't know how much better this is than most of this sort of game. Currently there are 11,000 odd names on the high score board. This is not good news people. Purchase.
 
  
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