Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Upon its X-Box 360 release, Space Giraffe was the most critically divisive game of 2007. Scan down those Metacritic scores. Those reviewers who slammed it – like Xbox US which gave it 2/10 and dismissed it as “damn-near-unplayable technoslop” – were openly mocked as weakling idiots by Jeff Minter’s devotees. Others, like Eurogamer, split the difference and did a dual review. In the end, the hailing didn’t matter – it simply didn’t sell. That hasn’t stopped its accolades building up. Stuart Campbell – who remains the world’s sharpest critic of arcade games – said it was “one of the best games released this year at any price”. No less than Braid-creator Jonathan Blow described it as “the arcade game analogue of Ulysses”. So – much-praised-yet-ignored underdog comes to the PC. And this is RPS. And I’m me.

It’s inevitable I’m going to like it, yeah?
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A new post on the Llamasoft site has revealed that Space Giraffe for PC is almost ready! Llamasoft’s Giles reports that “minor tweaks” are still to be performed on the expanded and possible somewhat-less-psychedelic PC version of the game, but that it is otherwise complete:

[W]hat you are going to get is Space Giraffe exactly as you seen it on the 360 PLUS an “expansion pack” with 100 NEW levels that “no one else has seen before”, some of them could be a bit more “vanilla” for those that found the SG original graphics maybe a bit “too blasting for their own taste” we wish this time to really manage to pleasure more and less psychedelic users

More on this when we get our hands on the PC version of Minter’s psychedelic synapse-curdler. Thanks Offworld!