I've been away for a few days so missed out on last week's Jeff Minter news. Minter? Older readers - in gaming terms that means the over 30s, sadly - will remember Minter from 80s hippycode classics Sheep in Space and Attack of the Mutant Camels. Younger readers experiencing Minter for the first time through his latest game - Space Giraffe on Xbox Live Arcade - may be wondering what the fuss was all about. Giraffe, a Tempest influenced shooter, has polarised opinion with sales suffering accordingly. The veteran coder wrote an angry post on his blog complaining that ancient arcade title Frogger had outsold Space Giraffe by over "ten to one".
He continued, "OK, we get the message. All you want on that channel is remakes of old, shite arcade games and crap you vaguely remember playing on your Amiga. ... We'll shut up trying to do anything new then."
The latest post cools down a little but clearly Minter is aggrieved by users desire to, " buy stuff they remember rather than stuff that's new." Now I've no idea on official sales figures - I'll try and get something out of Microsoft - but Space Giraffe's underperformance is hardly a surprise. The demo didn't do the game any favours - Giraffe's action isn't an instant pick up and play - and you can imagine those who decided to buy doing so because of Minter's reputation as much as anything.
There are other issues too. Live Arcade's cumbersome navigation - this is one of the few areas that the Playstation store does better - makes it difficult to find games when they have moved from the "what's new" section. And a quick look today shows Pac Man, which was released months ago on Live, at the top of that page. So maybe Minter does have a point. But elsewhere, when he fends off criticism of Space Giraffe's difficulty by bemoaning that, "players expect every little detail spoon-fed to them in excruciating detail by enormous great handholding tutorial modes", he sounds less like a gaming visionary and more like someone still hankering after the days of 3 lives and hi-score tables. Xbox Live Arcade then - what do you want from it? Retro or revolution?
