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OXM's 2.0 Space Giraffe review score explained by achievements/leaderboard?

Wario64

works for Gamestop (lol)
I thought this was interesting...it was posted in the Xbox Live Arcade thread but I think it should get some exposure.

http://www.yakyak.org/viewtopic.php?t=66861&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=356

OK, I found him on the Partnernet leaderboards. Come to think of it I remember having seen his entries before because they were a bit unusual.

He's on as "OXM Dan" and he has NO achievements at all for Space Giraffe. It's really pretty hard to play SG for any length of time and get no achievements whatsoever; there are a few that are given out fairly easily by way of encouragement. Genius-boy here has managed to get none at all.

His score in interesting because it shows that he got 6.7 million at a maximum level of 31. To have such a small score for level 31 is pretty extraordinary. It basically means that the player must have just been scraping through one level at a time, just barely pushing the start level and accompanying start bonus over the threshold each time, and stubbornly refusing to actually play on earlier levels and actually, y'know, learn something. It's a truly horrible way to play, a combination of idiocy and brute force that is spectacularly unrewarding.

A good player should be scoring 40 or 50 million by level 30. I'm looking at the leaderboard now, Jimaroid's level 30 score is 57 mill. "JoeQA" obviously playing the game correctly got 51 mill by level 31. I have a level *17* score that is 64 million (and that's the very point of SG; learning how to score efficiently is part of the skill and the pleasure of it).

In short, the leaderboards show that OXM Dan was playing the game in about the most shit way possible, and being absolutely crap at it. The leaderboards also show a lot of other people playing the game rather well, so we know it's not the game at fault here.

Basically he was just rubbish.
 
He played an arcade game enough to get NOT A SINGLE ACHIEVEMENT and then wrote a print review?

I can almost excuse him for not really getting the game well enough, he might just be stupid or slow. But even a slow-witted person should know their job well enough to know that something is amiss if you submit your review before you even got a single achievement.

Honestly I'd fire the guy. Maybe SG really is crap, but somebody is robbing a publisher by taking a paycheck for a job that he really isn't doing. And he's doing the readers a huge disservice.
 

BuG

Member
When's Space Giraffe coming out? Yak going off on a message board is pretty funny when you think about it but I just want to know when it's out.
 

Dave Long

Banned
It's a fact of life that game reviewers need to be thorough with Xbox 360 games if they're the type to try and get by without playing the game extensively. Everyone can see your achievements, making it painfully obvious whether you played the game or not.

I kind of like it. It's a good check on game reviewers to see if they're doing their job or not.
 

skip

Member
everytime the 360 debug needs a system update, it wipes everything out on the HDD, including your existing partnernet accounts. I think I've made at least 10 over the past 2ish years.
 

Gattsu25

Banned
painey said:
maybe he didnt use his main account to play it on
improbable...not because it very well could be true, but because it does not fit my agenda to consider this possibility

edit: this post is meant to allow for greater consideration of this possibility. note, however, that I do think this guy didn't know what the fuck he was doing and, in actuality, didn't earn a single achievement and royally sucked at the game
 

arne

Member
skip said:
everytime the 360 debug needs a system update, it wipes everything out on the HDD, including your existing partnernet accounts. I think I've made at least 10 over the past 2ish years.


Remove the HDD before you do a system update. The HDD doesn't need to be on there. And voila, doesn't wipe your info and you keep your PartnerNet account in perpetuity.



also, I personally didn't find Space Giraffe to be a 2.0 and I didn't really play it all that well or extensively.





forgeforsaken said:
Can't you recover gamertag like you can in standard live?

no.
 
skip said:
everytime the 360 debug needs a system update, it wipes everything out on the HDD, including your existing partnernet accounts. I think I've made at least 10 over the past 2ish years.

Can't you recover gamertag like you can in standard live?
 

USD

Member
On a serious note though, this isn't exactly definite indication of anything, though what it does implicates isn't very good.
 

Stumpokapow

listen to the mad man
skip said:
everytime the 360 debug needs a system update, it wipes everything out on the HDD, including your existing partnernet accounts. I think I've made at least 10 over the past 2ish years.

Have they done one since OXM would have received the review copy of Space Giraffe and played it to write the review?
 
2.0 is a really bad score, implying the game is intrinsically broken and terrible. Not a lot of games are that bad. I'll be surprised if it really is a 2, I could see it turning out not so good, but a 2 is hard to swallow.
 

BuG

Member
arne said:
also, I personally didn't find Space Giraffe to be a 2.0 and I didn't really play it all that well or extensively.
It's a 1.0 game, isn't it?

arne hates Space Giraffe. Rates it 1.0.

Bolded important parts.
 

p3tran

Banned
yes, the 2.0 score is indeed explainable from the highscore table/achievement list for anybody who cared to read the text. the reviewer didnt manage to get in synch with the game, even if he played for 31(!!) levels. so cant blame him either :)

Jeff stated that the game probably will not be for absolutely everyone, since it is an audiovisual synthesizer and stuff 8)

here's something nice to read for those interested in the game:
http://llamasoft.co.uk/blog/

btw its only gonna be 400pts.


I like this guy very much, and I think its gonna be a very trippy game :D

tr5.jpg
 

Acosta

Member
I don´t use to criticize another reviewer, this job have enough shitty things, but...

That score is just absurd and I don´t find any rationale explanation for it. I won´t be as far to check his gamerscore because he could use other account, but something is really wrong on that review.
 

skip

Member
arne said:
Remove the HDD before you do a system update. The HDD doesn't need to be on there. And voila, doesn't wipe your info and you keep your PartnerNet account in perpetuity.

awesome, thanks. they need to tell us these things!
 

itxaka

Defeatist
Dave Long said:
It's a fact of life that game reviewers need to be thorough with Xbox 360 games if they're the type to try and get by without playing the game extensively. Everyone can see your achievements, making it painfully obvious whether you played the game or not.

I kind of like it. It's a good check on game reviewers to see if they're doing their job or not.


Agreed 100%.

There is another review somewhere to check the other scores for SG? I feel it´s more that a 2 points game.
 
A professional would contact Jeff direct or a member of the Microsoft QA team and try to understand where they are going wrong. Deadline/communications/ignorance to blame?
 

Zenith

Banned
Mr. Mister said:
another shitty by-product of achievements

even if he used a dozen different accounts to play it, that still doesn't explain how he got such an effing crap score for level 31.
 

McBacon

SHOOTY McRAD DICK
I've seen people crap on multiplayer where they don't even have the achievement for "play one multiplayer game"
 

Aaron

Member
It's no conspiracy. It's just the common result of a reviewer assigned a game he didn't want to cover, and didn't know any of the background about. I'm betting for this game to click right away, you'll need to have some experience in the previous works of the illustrious Jeff Minter. Crap like this happens all the time in professional reviewing.
 
Aaron said:
It's no conspiracy. It's just the common result of a reviewer assigned a game he didn't want to cover, and didn't know any of the background about. I'm betting for this game to click right away, you'll need to have some experience in the previous works of the illustrious Jeff Minter. Crap like this happens all the time in professional reviewing.
That would explain a score of 4-6, not a "this game is a broken mess" score of 2.
 
Although I'd generally avoid speculating about the merits of a review score before actually playing the game myself, a 2/10 seems ridiculiously low. Even if this game was just a more "busy" version of Tempest (which I've heard it described as on the IGN podcast), it would still be worth the cash for me. A Tempest game for $5 on XBL with achievements? I have a hard time seeing how that could go so wrong.
 

Aaron

Member
Of All Trades said:
That would explain a score of 4-6, not a "this game is a broken mess" score of 2.
Why? If the reviewer already doesn't want to play the game and is forced to, then finds it seems like garbage, he's not going to reach for a benefit of the doubt. He's going to summon some petty revenge against the game for existing. I know I've been tempted to slam a game hard because of certain annoyances, but I'm too soft-hearted to reach for the dreaded two.
 

Burai

shitonmychest57
Aaron said:
Why? If the reviewer already doesn't want to play the game and is forced to, then finds it seems like garbage, he's not going to reach for a benefit of the doubt. He's going to summon some petty revenge against the game for existing. I know I've been tempted to slam a game hard because of certain annoyances, but I'm too soft-hearted to reach for the dreaded two.

lol.

Revenge against the game indeed.

The problem here is that Jeff Minter's games are incredibly polarising. You either love them, or you walk away in complete bewilderment. There is no middle ground.

If the reviewer doesn't get it, that's not the reviewer's fault. He has every right to not get it. That's just the nature of the games that Minter makes.

Jeff's expectations are incredibly unfair. He wants to keep his artistic integrity, but at the same time he wants the whole world to love his games. It just can't ever happen like that. His games are incredibly excluding by design and critics are just as likely to fall into his "exclusion zone".

Space Giraffe will not be hurt in the slightest by this review. The people that were going to buy it will still buy it. The people who'd be utterly baffled by the whole thing will still be utterly baffled.

The only annoying thing now is that the ever-paranoid Minter will now have a scapegoat for the inevitably low sales this game will have rather than having to face up to the reality that the vast majority of people really just don't get his games.
 

_Angelus_

Banned
Is this a souped up Tempest 2000?

Hope so because I fucking love the game and still play it to this day.
Whats the PC freeware version of the game that made the rounds as well? That one is even better since I can play it on my PC using my 360 pad. I uninstalled the damn thing and don't know its name,anyone know what its called,I need to find it.
 
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