Jeff Minter can't take bad press apparently, so he has issued a media blackout on his upcoming project, according to Gameplayer.
"Nobody not known and trusted by us even gets a sniff of this till it's out after the f***ing-over we got last time."
If you stick an audio CD into an Xbox One it will (after downloading the relevant app) play it quite happily, and even pull the album cover and track list from the Gracenote database. Neat. Do the same with an Xbox 360, and you will enter a whole different world – one that is entirely generated by the best visualizer ever created.
In 2003, after 20 years of creating lightsynths for almost every platform, Jeff managed to get his incredible vision for Neon into a console that lasted a decade and sold more than 80 million units worldwide.
I loved the 360 music visualizer. I remember the short video they made about the making of it.
Its strange, MS had so much focus regarding music playback when the last gen kicked off but they don't seem as bothered this time round.
I was personally hoping for a kickass visualizer this time round but no, not even background music. And we are still waiting, Lame.
Ken McKown writes: The From A to Z series lets our editors go back and take a look at games from past generations that are classics, overlooked gems, or just titles they remember fondly. The idea behind this is to pick five games from each letter of the alphabet, once a week to showcase. This delivers 26 weeks and 130 games to talk about. Hopefully it sparks some conversation, and of course plenty of memories.
Our first series will focus on Sony’s first entry into the console business, the PlayStation.
Let’s continue with the letter “G”.
Ah Gran Torismo! I remember playing the demo for it a ton as a kid. My father, who isn't even a gamer would even play it. He was into how "realistic" it as and how fun it was at the time. Good times!
But yeah, another great list of great games.
Hardcore Gamer: As of today the PC version is 100% free. Gridrunner++ plays just as well now as it did in 2002, and its pixel-shatter stylings make it look right at home with today's indie-retro gaming. Gridrunner++ is 4MB of pure reflex-based gaming perfection, and still holds up as the greatest arcade shooter ever made.
Whatever project he is working on doesn't interest me as I thought space giraffe sucked ass.
I have a lot of respect for Minter. But I'm not sure how relevant his output is in the current industry.
I'm not saying that games like his are no longer needed or wanted - quite the opposite in fact. But the game has to be good.
Space Giraffe was not a good game. The fundamental mechanics were there for a solid game, but the way it was wrapped up and presented was not good... The biggest problem was that the crazy backgrounds often obscured the action... This is a fundamental and basic problem which should not appear in modern games (or any games... even old Sinclair Spectrum games did a better job of differentiating backgrounds with characters and bullets and they only had 8 colours to choose from)!
If Minter has an issue with the press he's not going to do himself any favours by bad mouthing them, especially as for the most part they were spot on in their reviews.
On a side note, perhaps he would just like to submit his next game to Edge (UK) magazine and no one else for review... His regular column seemed to guarantee Space Giraffe a score way higher than it deserved and is the only time I've felt Edge compromised their normally high integrity.