Google is a magical company to work for; every day here in Mountain View is like a little fairy tale unto itself. Today's pixie dust came straight from Jeff Minter of Llamasoft, responsible for Tempest 2k, Llamatron, and who wrote the XBox 360's music visualiser; he reviewed his history of work and gave us a quick playthrough (and let us play with) his new project for the XBox Live Arcade, Space Giraffe.
He started by showing off some of his earliest games in an emulator, and walked us through the body and history of his work. He pointed out the common threads in that body of work, and linked it to his current project, the Neon "virtual light machine" which ships in every 360 as the music visualiser, and the game which uses that visualisation engine as a starting point, Space Giraffe.
I'll skip to the important part. Space Giraffe is a little like Tempest, but if you play it like Tempest, you'll never get any points. The game has been turned on its head; the whole thing plays through, and plays with, the neon visual rendering system - not just backgrounds, but the whole environment, gamespace and entities, are all played through the LSD-like effects system. Far from being a gimmick, it feels authentically and naturally part of the core game.
Llamatron, and Jeff Minter specifically, have succeded in creating a game that takes elements of the known, imparts a huge amount of new material, and fundamentally changes both the experience and the gameplay while preserving playability and familiarity. It's beautiful, it's fun, it's clever, and it's really, really intuitive. There's a strong visual cueing that takes place between you and the interactive playfield - it gives you good visual ways of knowing when all of the new powers that you have beyond those of the core tempest game are ready for use, and the game makes strong use of that visual cueing all the way through the game experience.
What's most impressive is that it's not just you interacting with the gameplay, or you interacting with the effects system; your enemies have ways of manipulating the effects system to increase the difficulty levels and alter the gamespace. And all of it happens in a way that looks natural and doesn't overly-punish the player while still increasing difficulty levels. On earlier levels, you and your enemies can be defined by the lines that are drawn; on later levels, sometimes you and your enemies are the holes in the light and color, and sometimes the whole game is a beautiful, colorful negative.
This game is a work of art. It deserves to be played. It deserves to be successful. And I encourage each and every one of you to sit down, turn out the lights, fire it up on the biggest TV you've got, and just get immersed.
You can read more about Space Giraffe in Jeff's LiveJournal (http://stinkygoat.livejournal.com). It was a privilege to see, and when he says that Level 64 really needs to be seen in motion to appreciate its beauty, he's not kidding. This is one of those games for which screenshots do no justice whatsoever - the whole point of the game is in the visual movement, not in the static image.
