One of the most anticipated titles on XBLA is to be released this Wednesday. Jeff Minter's Space Giraffe is hyperdriving into the Marketplace, and sidling along it is - after what seems like ages - Street Trace: NYC.

There seems to be some confusion on the pricing of hypnotic shooter Space Giraffe though. While we hear from the Major that the official press release does notch it up as 800 MS Points, the developer himself said in his LiveJournal blog that it's actually just 400 MS Points. If that's the case, then, man, that's so going to be worth it. For those wondering why some of us have been excited for this, we shall mention a quote from the Llamasoft Blog:

Space Giraffe is an evolution of the tube shooter, but it’s a huge one – if Tempest 2000 represents the difference between a caveman and a caveman with fire, Space Giraffe is the difference between a caveman and Ben Affleck. - Yak

Street Trace: NYC is also another video game that some of you might have been waiting for since way back when. For those who aren't familiar, it's developed by Gaia Industries and plays kind of like Trickstyle (Dreamcast). It's a hoverboard racing title with some rather intense versus action, sliding in at 800 MS Points.

Looks like it's a good solid week on XBLA. Given that BioShock isn't taking too much of your playing time, then by all means, splurge on your MS Points.

That's it. Jeff Minter's blog says it. Space Giraffe is done. Well, barring a bit of polish here and there, but it's done. What's left is Microsoft certification and this will be in Marketplace for, according to Eurogamer, the "paltry" sum of 400 Microsoft points.

One of the features Jeff's plugging into this game is the Game Over screen. Besides telling you that, simply, your skills teh suxxor if you can't complete all 100 levels of the game, it will demonstrate how your skills are teh suxxor with a convenient and equally psychedelic graph. As he says, the green line is your best level scores to date, the yellow line is what the game considers to be "good" scores through those same levels, and the orange section represents recently-played progress through the game. Simply put, given any point on the graph,

IF Green < Yellow

THEN You = Teh Suxxor for that level/s.

 

Gamasutra got to talking with Llamasoft's Jeff Minter to talk about making Space Giraffe (and hope the visuals don't induce seizures... kidding), and you'd be surprised at what goes on behind the scenes. Well, for starters, the core dev team is really an army of two: Jeff Minter and Ivan Zorzin. Well, there is an extended team of contributors that he's grateful for, but at the core, it's just the two of them.

So if you're wondering why it's taking a bit of time for this visual menagerie to hit Xbox Live Arcade, well, there's one of them.

He also revealed why the game's called Space Giraffe: it's sort of accidental demand. He posted a picture of "a little creature" and a giraffe at a watering hole - absolutely nothing to do with what you see in the game, we guess - on a forum thread called The Space Giraffe, and suddenly, he says gaming site suddenly reported that he was working on a game called "Space Giraffe"! And that's how it stuck.

Who knows if the giraffe and "the little creature" made it into the game? Other stuff you might like to know:

• Don't worry, no matter how weird the levels start to look, Jeff says "if you're actually in there playing it, you can still read it." So the screenshots really can't do any justice to this game; we need visuals.
• Jeff Minter loves the visual power he's got with the Xbox 360. He especially loves pixel shading.
• Each level in Space Giraffe has its own graphical theme.
• This is a self-funded game, because they wanted to maximize returns: "We didn't want to take any funding... We figured we'd go out on a limb and self-fund, and then hopefully do better when it's released."
• Contractually speaking, Llamasoft is still very much third party; they can code for the PS3 and Wii if they wanted to - except for the light synthesizer, which is contractually restricted to Microsoft.
• And Jeff would one day like to work with the Wii; he'd like "to get cracking" on another Xbox Live Arcade game before then.
• Yes, Jeff does own llamas. As pets.

It seems that Jeff Minter maintains a LiveJournal where he can keep readers up to date on whatever he's doing, including the work being done on Space Giraffe (Llamasoft). And in the latest blog post a couple of days ago, he says that all the main levels are complete for the game. He also mentions that he's the only one in the alpha team with a build "that goes all the way to 100" - which kinda implies that there are 100 main levels in this game.

(Yep, it has to be Jeff Minter.)

Oh, well. Shine get, most certainly. Not only that, we now know the extent of the coming Xbox Live Arcade title, although Jeff also says that he has some tweaking to do over those 100 levels. Other than that, are you ready for 100 levels of trippy, back-to-the-60's, "oh god, what have I been drinking last night?" gameplay?

CONGRATULATION! YOU SUCCESS!
A WINNER IS YOU!
BUT OUR GIRAFFE IS IN ANOTHER CASTLE!
(x 100)

Yep, you got that right. Jeff Minter's flower power-themed psychedelic action game Space Giraffe is all set to hit Xbox Live Arcade-- all they're waiting for now is Microsoft's go signal.

1up reports that according to the dev's LiveJournal blog, a user by the name of StinkyGoat divulged some details about the game going on an alpha release to MS tomorrow. Here's what StinkyGoat said about the alpha release:

The release to MS is a little bit scary because we effectively get the go/no go for the whole thing on this submission, but damn me if it doesn't look gorgeous and I think it plays really nicely so I would be very surprised if we have any problems there.

Well, if the game lives up to these words, then we guess there won't be any problems getting that thumbs up from MS. Some are saying that Space Giraffe actually looks a lot like Geometry Wars, but we doubt the gameplay would be highly similar. After all, we trust Jeff Minter has a few twists and tricks up his sleeves for this trippy game. To get a preview of this game on XBLA, you can check out the video we brought you guys a while back, rest assured we'll keep you posted for further developments.

So where's the giraffe? And if it is in fact in the game somewhere, what's it doing in outer space? Why the giraffe? Why not a hippo, or a lion, or a peacock? Nobody really knows the answer to those questions, except for Space Giraffe creator Jeff Minter, maybe.

What we do know is that we've described this game as psychedelic and trippy. You know why? Because it is. Just check out this new gameplay vid from the game. Although Space Giraffe itself appears to draw inspiration from the arcade game Tempest, we can't help but be reminded of Dance Dance Revolution with its funky beat, but minus the dance pad.

It won't be out for the XBLA until some time next year, but already, it's causing enough trippy stir to have us wanting it now. Check out the vid below, and get lost in a trance for 10 minutes.

From its title alone, Space Giraffe, you can tell the game is going to be a real trip. But what do you expect from the same mind who gave us Tempest 2001, Gridrunner, Trip-a-Tron and Mama Llama?

Jeff Minter's new space shooter looks like an oil slick on acid with colors exploding in space like never before seen by any mortal (except possibly Anne Heche). It also introduces "Girrafestastic," a word never before uttered by any mortal (except possiby  Robin Williams).

Space Giraffe will soon cast its hypnotic visual spell on Live Arcade sometime in the future but you can take a short trip now with the video.

Jeff Minter, the author of such 8-bit classics as Gridrunner, Trip-a-Tron, Mama Llama and Tempest 2000 is set to return to gaming through Xbox Live Arcade and his title Space Giraffe (which is actually a sequel to Tempest 2000/3000). This is after his most recent work on the Xbox360 Music Visualizer.

At this stage, not much is known about Space Giraffe (who the main character in the game is, among others), but it will only cost you 400 MS notes, will support the webcam input, will support users custom soundtracks that they want to put in the game and new neon effects will be available as unlockables

Space Giraffe is due for release on XBLA later this year, but in the meantime check out the game's trippy visuals below.