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Conversations about Space Giraffe tend to focus on how it looks. How it sounds is just as important, though. Every enemy, every shot, every single interaction with Jeff Minter's vivid and relentlessly busy tube blaster comes with its own distinct audio cue, from the escalating knife-on-a-wineglass chimes of a flower being trimmed, to the push-button beep of a sneeze bouncing back into the playing field. The more I play it, the more I've started to realise that Space Giraffe's ultimately about a weird form of triangulation - about zeroing in on the location of a threat by combining the imperfect data from your eyes with the imperfect data from your ears. This alone makes it one of the most exciting and original games ever created, if you ask me - and also one of the most divisive.For example: many have noticed that, on a basic level, Space Giraffe isn't very fair, that it blinds you with the neon clouds and pools of dazzling colours generated by its designer's beloved light synths and then kills you while you're still blinking from it all. This misses the point, I think. Show me a good arcade game that is fair. Show me one that's about straight-up symmetry, anyway - and that still manages to make your heart race and your fingers tremble. Fairness is great if you've torn a rotator cuff at work and want a bit of compensation, but it's frequently boring in game design terms. From Defender to Galaga to Space Giraffe's great, great, great grandfather Tempest, arcade games are about being out-manned and often out-gunned - and there's no better feeling that really pummelling a game that lays things on thick. They swarm at you in great numbers, and you are just a single mistake away from oblivion: a great arcade game allows you to actually revel in the unfairness of it all. A really great arcade game offers you strengths that are entirely complementary to your weaknesses, too. And for Space Giraffe, that means bulling.
If you've never tried a tube shooter before, here's some quick orientation: in Space Giraffe, you play a stoic little coathanger of light sliding along the nearest edge of a piece of simple wireframe geometry. You're skating around the rim of a tube, or a plain, or a wonky shape that defies easy description. Enemies advance towards you from the horizon, switching between neat little lanes, and you can whittle them down with your shots. Here's the Space Giraffe twist, though: if they get to you and start to clamber along the rim with you - and if you still have your power zone, which is a barrier reaching out into the playing field, extended - you can ram into these enemies and finish them off en masse for gigantic scores. This is bulling, and it's wonderful. It's not easy to pull off - to keep the power zone from shrinking back to nothing you need to be moving and shooting or using one of your precious collectible pods - but it's more than worth it. The audio fragments as the wail of a screaming Spitfire engine soars over the soundtrack, livestock moos and bays in the distance, and your foes are scattered into golden light. A risk well taken - there's nothing quite like it.
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