Thursday morning I received an instant message out of the blue: Do you understand Space Giraffe?
This summed up the general consensus quite nicely. I agree with it and I’m now convinced that OXM Dan was right and Minter was an ass for calling him out.
so we know it’s not the game at fault here.
Wrong. Now, look, I consider myself a competent gamer. Sometimes even a skilled one. I broke a million in Geometry Wars; I have gold in every cup in F-Zero GX on Master difficulty; I can kick your ass in Lumines (yes, that’s a challenge). I’ve played many games and quite a few of them were rather abstract, like anything by Kenta Cho, and I can play those games without problem. Space Giraffe? Not so much.
I gave it a chance. I played through the tutorial twice and went through the help options and looked at peoples’ impressions of the game online. I get the idea for the mechanics. Shoot things a bit, acquire jump pods and then ram enemies off the board to build up a score multiplier. I understand that but when I try to ram the enemies, sometimes I die and sometimes I don’t. To this day I’ve yet to figure out how to tell when I can do what. That’s the biggest problem with Space Giraffe. It’s not the noisy gameplay that frustrates, it’s the noisy UI and the useless tutorials. You can get used to busy gameplay as long as you know what is going on. Here, I do not.
Got glasses?