This right here is it. Available right this second on Xbox Live, for mere pennies, the best arcade game in an age. Synapse firing, adrenaline rushing, instinct driving, bright, wild and neon-fucked. You don't really need to read this review, just go and buy it now.

Don't believe me? Alright, that is a little slim. Space Giraffe is the spiritual successor to Tempest 3000 and Tempest 2000, Jeff Minter's personal rebuild of David Theurer's 1980 arcade original. Except, Space Giraffe really isn't Tempest at all. An inspired piece of design turns everything inside out. To describe the design-shock of Space Giraffe, we should first look at the lineage.

Video A - EMERGENT

Tempest takes your basic Space Invaders idea of throwing an overwhelming quantity of enemies at you, then chucks everything into a 3D world. For this to make sense as an addictive arcade schmup, you and your enemies are locked onto a vector web. Your claw spins around the near rim, and enemies casually make their way towards you from the far end. This great leap to 3D arcading, and the perfect spinner controls that came with it, created a very memorable experience.

Video B - BOI DA ESTRELA

14 years later Atari release Tempest 2000. Minter combines his great love for the original, with Llamasoft creativity - the trademark obsession with certain animals (llamas, sheep and camels being the mainstays), expertly judged arcade gameplay, and a joyous carnage of particle effects. While games like Defender demanded the player reach a symbiotic state to find serious high scoring, here was an arcade shooter designed expressly for the player to zone with. Key to this is the much gentler difficulty progression, which gets you to relax with the game and get comfortable, before hitting you with a few difficulty spikes further in.

Video C - EXALTED PINKNESS

Another 6 years, and Tempest 3000 uniquely justifies the Nuon's existence. Without compromise, Tempest 3000 goes straight for seasoned Tempest 2000 players using a steeper difficulty curve, balanced by the reward of imaginative new enemies and visual design. Now the 3D web has become less familiar, as enemies fold, spin, and warp your world around you. Visual effects mimic the original vector display, as well as feeding back and melting colour to create this amazing fluid world within which you are trying to gain control.

Video D - 42

Now there is Space Giraffe. The 3D webs, far-approaching enemies, power-up progression and swirling visual charge - you'll find them all here, present, correct and updated. So what has changed? Think back to Space Invaders for a moment, and you'll recall an enemy reaching you is instant death. Tempest plays along those lines, where sharing your end of the web with others is nearly always bad news. Keeping enemies at bay is ingrained into what Tempest is, and how you play it. In complete contradiction, Space Giraffe encourages you to get as many enemies at your end of the web as possible. Your Giraffe can roll across the lot, bulling them off the edge of the rim, in the sheerest points-lust frenzy since the Humanoid-strewn Brain waves of Robotron. This volte-face in gameplay, and the deviousness in level and enemy design that comes from it, is fantastic.

Video E - QUANTUM TUNNELLING

On the surface the game now seems incredibly easy, but that isn't the case at all. Space Giraffe simply changes every single rule you play the game by. You need to be dispatching enemies, or bullets, or picking up power-up pods, at a steady rate to keep your ability to knock enemies off the rim (indicated by a power-zone extending down the web from the near end). With no power-zone at all enemies can grab your hooves, dragging you to near-certain death. Sounds simple enough, but shooting enemies to keep the power-zone charged contradicts your new goal of bulling enemies from the rim to fire up your multiplier (three enemies bulled in quick succession increase your multiplier by one, to a maximum of nine). So perhaps you only shoot enemy bullets and collect pods instead. Nuh-uh, pods turn up only when enemies are defeated, however using a pod also increases the power-zone. Ok, so lets just take it easy, and use a pod when we need to. Not so bad, but the more pods you keep hold of the higher your end of level bonus will be. So perhaps we'll stick to collecting pods? Nope, because you need the full x9 multiplier for the end of level bonus to be worth anything. And so it goes.

There are many different methods to keep your multiplier high, your pod collection good, and bulled enemies on track, the balance is incredibly well conceived, utterly beguiling and thoroughly addictive. You will find yourself adjusting to each level; some play best on juggling bullets (you get a bonus for each bounced back at the end of a level), some on avoiding enemies until a last moment bull, some on collecting pods until the really nasty stuff shows up half way through, or a combination of any of these and more. As you progress enemies become more and more devious in thwarting your sweat-soaked bull run across the rim, eventually forcing you to revert back to a 1980 style from time to time, just to keep everything at bay. The new ability to aim shots with your hooves, as long as you have some power-zone charged up, becomes critical to your survival as the game ramps up.

For it's 100 levels Space Giraffe develops the shape and impact of the web itself, as well as altering the balance of each level by changing the behaviour of its enemies. Your attackers can speed up as a level progresses, fire more often or not at all, flowers (vertical spikes) can grow at different rates and to different lengths. All the while you are dealing with these changing enemies, the light synth develops and demands your understanding also. Colours bleed and warp and rotate, enemies begin to invert them, distorted images reflect the web and wrap around it. Working in unison, a precise array of arcade sound effects designate every event in the game, while a resonant music selection persuades the light synth how to behave. Everything is perceptible, and yet everything is constantly changing, exploding, yelling and glowing. The exhilaration of absorbing this barely controllable audio-visual spasm, and feeling the game within, is incredible.

The whole experience is so damned exciting. This is what we want! This is how any gamer felt the first time they stumbled across an arcade, the moment of clarity when the depth of such a simple set of rules that can provide so much freedom becomes apparent. The moment you get the shot timing right on the purple bastards in Galaxian, the moment you deliberately allow your ship to be captured in Galaga, the moment you take down a pterodactyl in Joust, the moment you get a perfect bonus round on Gyruss, or the moment you get that bloody high jump right in Track 'n' Field. You and the game joined in a mesh of reflex and instinct.

Space Giraffe is a truly great arcade game. I recommend it absolutely, and hope to see you on the score boards.