Space Giraffe "is not Tempest 4000", says Minter

Kicking off the Independent Game Summit at this year's GDC, veteran game coder and camel fanatic Jeff Minter has given a fresh showcase of his new XBLA game Space Giraffe, which he insists "is not Tempest 4000. "

"Space Giraffe is not Tempest. It may look like Tempest but that's basically because I wanted to have some kind of continuity with Tempest 2000," he told the keynote audience. "Plus I don't want to have to always worry about who owns the rights to the name Tempest," he notes as one of the reasons for ditching the shooter IP.

Minter demoed several levels of the psychedelic 360 blaster (including our favorites "Stargate: Basingstoke" and "Another Day in the Orifice") which shares technology with the Xbox 360's own visualization software, which Minter developed for Microsoft.

As for when Space Giraffe will hit Live Arcade, Minter says it will be ready for the submission process in "maybe March," after which it will take "maybe six weeks" to get through.

March 7, 2007