Platform: Xbox 360 Live Arcade | Developer: Llamasoft | Publisher: Microsoft | Released: August 22nd 2007 | Price: 400 MS Points (£3-4)

The games industry doesn't have enough characters, and too many of the ones it does have are contrived PR products. One of the few genuinely endearing souls is a certain Mr. Jeff Minter. He's never really hit a huge commercial nail on the head, but has kept his games' philosophy the same for nearly 30 years even so. He's one of the few famous 'bedroom coder' veterans still making games in a similar way. Space Giraffe was developed by just two people, on a small-holding in darkest Wales, but it's more than a mere curiosity.

Space Giraffe is an abstract shooting game, bathed in music visualiser. It has a number of solid gameplay mechanics which allow it to explore additional complexities and subtleties, and it all comes together much better than you might expect, for a very unique experience. It's essentially the classic arcade game Tempest, with some significant twists and a matted woolly fleece of zany Llamasoft self-indulgence. The entire thing languishes in a shower of animal noises, gaming in-jokes and general silliness.

In each of the 100 levels you are presented with a tempest style polygonal structure (in various increasingly baffling shapes and patterns) with lanes along which the enemies stream towards you. You being a neon vector-based squatting giraffe, emitting bullets from its hooves. In Space. While in Tempest the idea was to stop anything reaching the rim along which your avatar scuttles, here, the enemies pose no immediate threat and you must actively collect as many on your rim as possible. However, in order to keep the geometric blighters subdued, you have to keep the 'power zone' extended by shooting and collecting things selectively. Once you've lured as much prey to the top of your web as possible, you simply plough through them bull them off for your main source of points. You are shooting constantly, there is no shoot button; meaning that you must make concessions, take risks and use patience in simply deciding where to position yourself.

As the levels progress, different enemies are introduced as you'd expect. Combined with the inventive and diverse level designs, the pace of the game is incredibly varied throughout rather then simply becoming more and more intense. Although at its heart it is a challenging score attack game, great efforts have been made to make it a fun game to play more casually. The bonus levels for example, is intentionally relaxing and simple, just a rewarding space to mess about to some ethereal music and dancing colours for a short while before the utter madness returns. When you run out of lives you can continue from the level you are on indefinitely, although your score is reset, or indeed start from any level you've reached with a new game. So if, like me, you're not very good at it (not yet anyway...), the game respects and encourages different attitudes toward different sessions.
Although music does not form part of the gameplay in any form, you're intended to use the Xbox 360's music capabilities to put your own music on, and the background reacts to it a little, so you can have very different experiences simply by playing to different music. The three included tracks, which loop endlessly, will get a bit tiresome after a while, especially if you're not into electronica.

So that's have Space Giraffe, the best game on the 360 to get a little bit pissed to, and for the price of about £4 it's practically theft on your part for buying it, so you can't really complain that very occasionally it's all a bit too over the top and you can't even see what kills you occasionally. Play the trial, give it a chance, bask in its swirling neon glow. Ignore the naysayers for you have better taste and an open mind!