“Space Giraffe is NOT Tempest!” screams the instructions in Jeff “360 music visualizer” Minter’s latest interactive audiovisual orgy. Okay, but Space Giraffe does take nearly all its cues from Atari’s classic coin-op (which Minter has reworked before).

As in Tempest, you’re an abstract creature on the edge of an electric grid floating in space, relentlessly blasting the geometric creatures that shimmy up its lanes. Giraffe enhances that by letting you jump over enemies, steer your shots, and ram baddies off the playfield, but user-friendliness has been thrown out in the name of psychedelic presentation.

You’ll frequently die because you couldn’t pick out the pulsing assassin from the warped playfield floating over the throbbing LSD nightmare that is the background, which makes this a uniquely aggravating game. With poor visibility (apparently by design) and a thumping electronica soundtrack peppered with sophomoric sound effects, Space Giraffe offers 100 levels of damn-near-unplayable technoslop.

On Xbox Live Arcade

+ Unlike anything you've ever seen (except Tempest)

- Too visually noisy to figure out what's going on

- Actually made us angry when we played it

? Is this a failed game or a failed art experiment?

2.0