In our ongoing weekly column spotlighting some of the secretly classic, kitschy, overlooked, or downright wack games in the vast Xbox library, guest columnist Nathan Meunier ventures into the sights, sounds, and scoring of XBLA "shooter" Space Giraffe. Check out the Backtracking archives here.

It’s not often that a game’s splash screen is so alarmingly bizarre that it forces you to pause for a moment to consider whether or not it’s a good idea to proceed. Space Giraffe gets off to such a weird start that it makes you wonder if you’ve just been dosed with hallucinogens. You’re greeted with a swirling neon vortex punctuated with a fuzzed-out bobbing giraffe head, a child’s voice chanting repetitive gibberish, and high pitch electronic space blips — and that’s before you even start playing. While this love-it-or-hate-it retro space shooter made a splash with its over-the-top psychedelic freakiness, equally memorable is the controversy that surrounded its creator’s outspoken response to critic reviews and meager sales.

With a storied game development history dating back to the glory days of the Atari 2600 and Commodore 64, Llamasoft founder Jeff Minter is no stranger to the old-school or the eccentric. Considering he programmed scads of retro games back when they were considered cutting edge, it’s no surprise many of those classic game design aesthetics make an appearance in his present-day work. When it came out on Xbox Live Arcade in late 2007, Space Giraffe was both hailed and derided as a sort of “Tempest on drugs” — a parallel drawn more readily due to the fact Minter had worked on several remakes of the popular Atari shooter. It’s a comparison he vehemently opposed, though it seems puzzling — Tempest is a pretty rad game.

Minter offered up this ironic T-shirt graphic lampooning OXM's score for Space Giraffe after the review ran.

Many critics gave Space Giraffe generally middling scores when the game released, but it was OXM’s Dan Amrich who incited Minter’s wrath when he rated it a 2.0 out of 10 — noting the trippy shooter offered “100 levels of damn-near-unplayable technoslop.” The ensuing controversy kicked off with Minter leading the charge in a rather nasty, heated forum barrage against Amrich, the review, and the magazine. (You can even still buy a T-shirt with the graphic above — designed by Minter at the time — here.) Around this time, the agitated developer also railed publicly against the game’s poor sales, threatening to quit game design altogether. “Not seeing a lot of reason to continue even trying to make games, at this point, when a remake of Frogger, one of the worst games in the history of old arcade games, can outsell Space Giraffe that we put so much love and effort into, by more than ten to one, in one week,” he wrote in a vitriolic online journal post.

Everything simmered down soon enough, as drama tends to do. With the dust now long-settled, revisiting Space Giraffe from a different perspective still reveals one hell of a weird game that’s both unique and flawed but not without redeeming qualities if you like to get your psychedelic freak on.

Perhaps sensing the inevitable, Minter included a note that states “Space Giraffe is not Tempest” among the first words you find in the game’s vitally-necessary tutorial. That’s arguable. However unwanted, the comparison fits, since both shooters have you moving your ship back and forth across the edge of a 3D field attempting to blast away all the geometric beasties that come crawling down towards you in much the same manner. Scope out Minter’s work on Tempest 3000, and you’ll find the similarities are too numerous to mention — at least on the surface. What makes Space Giraffe cool in its own right is the sheer level of utter bat-s*** craziness layered on top of the core Tempest formula.

For starters, auto-fire is always engaged, making your “giraffe ship,” which doesn’t really resemble either, spew a dizzying flurry of bullets as you zip back and forth across the edge of the playing field. Other mechanics set the game apart while ramping up the potential for confusion and chaos. Killing enemies pushes back an ever-encroaching power zone that lets you run into foes to shove them off the edge as long as there’s still room left. You can shoot and juggle enemy bullets back up the screen for more points, triggering jumps pods lets you hang back for a moment and avoid collisions with certain foes, and there’s a laser-guided smart-bomb for taking down everyone at once when things tight. Yeah, there’s a lot going on all at once, all the time. It’s a fun kind of disorder, when you take the time to get a feel for how each mechanic fits into the bigger puzzle.

Complicating the gameplay mechanics alone apparently wasn’t enough, though. Space Giraffe is as much an experiment in audiovisual entropy as it is in twitchy arcade shooting. This is where things get…interesting. The background of each stage is a constant washing machine of swirling color and bright light that bleeds into the frenzied neon spazz-fest exploding in the foreground. When each kill sprays more glowing particles and number scores across the screen, and foes themselves further muck up the visual landscape, it’s easy to lose track what it is you’re actually doing. Thank the heavens for infinite continues. Each stage’s hypnotic flow hits a crescendo within seconds of starting, and Space Giraffe’s absurd soundtrack adds to the cacophony. Thumping techno mingles with the braying of lambs, bull noises, and warped voice effects to further scramble your brain. When you die, the telephone rings. It all weaves into an incredibly dense stew of insanity.

By level 11 (out of 100, mind you) the intensity ramps-up drastically, making the experience over-stimulating to the point some gamers would find it painful to keep playing. For others, well, let’s just say it’s not a bad way to spend a Friday night. Whether you find Space Giraffe’s avant-garde approach to retro shooters nauseating or enthralling (for those in the latter camp, you're joined by the likes of Braid creator Jonathan Blow), it’s a wild ride for a shockingly reasonable five bucks. That’s cheaper than a six-pack, and you get the same effect.

(Space Giraffe released on Xbox Live Arcade on August 22, 2007, and is still available for an amazingly affordable asking price — even at launch it was a great initial price point — of 400 MS Points, or $5 US. And like all XBLA games, there's a demo if you're on the fence.)