XBOX 360 Wire

Xbox 360 Live Arcade : Space Giraffe gets 2/10 in OXM (Thanks to moronic reviewer)

Have you spent the last few months salivating over Jeff Minter’s latest title Space Giraffe? I certainly have…

Imagine my horror then, when this morning I heard that the Official Xbox Magazine gave the title a particularly poor 2/10. I swear I started sulking almost immediately. I’ve been waiting for Space Giraffe to arrive on Live! for a long time now, after having seen early video of it’s ‘tempest-like-euphoria’ whilst also following Jeff’s editorials in EDGE magazine.

But, all is not lost - thanks to some investigation by moderator ‘Yak’ from the yakyak.org forums.

“OK, I found him on the Partnernet leaderboards. Come to think of it I remember having seen his entries before because they were a bit unusual.

He’s on as “OXM Dan” and he has NO achievements at all for Space Giraffe. It’s really pretty hard to play SG for any length of time and get no achievements whatsoever; there are a few that are given out fairly easily by way of encouragement. Genius-boy here has managed to get none at all.

His score in interesting because it shows that he got 6.7 million at a maximum level of 31. To have such a small score for level 31 is pretty extraordinary. It basically means that the player must have just been scraping through one level at a time, just barely pushing the start level and accompanying start bonus over the threshold each time, and stubbornly refusing to actually play on earlier levels and actually, y’know, learn something. It’s a truly horrible way to play, a combination of idiocy and brute force that is spectacularly unrewarding.

A good player should be scoring 40 or 50 million by level 30. I’m looking at the leaderboard now, Jimaroid’s level 30 score is 57 mill. “JoeQA” obviously playing the game correctly got 51 mill by level 31. I have a level *17* score that is 64 million (and that’s the very point of SG; learning how to score efficiently is part of the skill and the pleasure of it).

In short, the leaderboards show that OXM Dan was playing the game in about the most shit way possible, and being absolutely crap at it. The leaderboards also show a lot of other people playing the game rather well, so we know it’s not the game at fault here.

Basically he was just rubbish. ”

So, the reviewer was just rubbish at the game. And to think these are the guys who we trust to review titles like Halo 3. I’ll buy it anyway.

Posted by Bleem - August 20th, 2007 -