There demoing a new game was Jeff Minter, the legendary creator of a lot of my favourite old games. :) So as soon as I entered the hall, I made a beeline towards his stand and tried his new game! (it wasn't crowded; he was competing with the PS4, Nintendo, and Oculus Rift after all)
It's called TxK, and is a Tempest-type game for the Playstation Vita.
Despite not being a finished game, it plays pretty solidly; you move along the rim of the field (which may be crazy shaped), shooting forward at the enemies who are coming towards you and firing in various patterns. Sometimes they drop power-ups (always in the same order), and they give you various abilities, one of which is the ability to jump, which is super-handy because it lets you get out of the way and shoot enemies that have made it to the rim.
For this reason, it gets very hard if you miss a power up. My reaction to that is "get better at the game", but I don't know if that makes for a good game mechanic for other players. It's a problem I have with a lot of the old Taito shoot-em-up arcade games from the 80s (Darius? Gradius? I forget...) where you are doing great, but lose a life and since you also lost your power-ups, you're very vulnerable and lose all your other lives very quickly. At least with TxK, the levels are short - it makes it not so hard to recover from a mistake.
There are also (a very limited number of) smart bombs that kill all the enemies at once, which you can activate by touching the screen.
Sometimes, I'm not sure what causes it, but you get a triangle awarded. They appear at the top right of the screen. I eventually collected enough of them (four, I think) and was treated to a bonus stage. In the bonus stage, you had to fly through rings, but I didn't immediately work out the controls so I missed and it ended the bonus stage early.
In this photo, my boyfriend Rich is on the left, Jeff is in the centre and I'm on the right. Jeff's co-programmer Giles very kindly took the photo.
Rich was pouring praise upon Jeff and talking about arcade controls for iPads because they had Gridrunner in a mini iPad arcade running. But at the same time, Rich said that he was afraid to try this new game because Space Giraffe had scared him off, because he's no good at it. Jeff said that TxK's a lot more straightforward and less "out of your head", which it is. So he had a go.
When I eventually got a word in, I let Jeff know that I think Space Giraffe is the best game he ever made. He agreed with me. I told him why; because it's completely different and new kind of shoot-em-up, that you play it with your ears, instead of just your eyes. And he was delighted to meet someone who gets it.
I also told him that TxK might be the game that makes me buy a Vita, that I've been playing his games since I was very young (I found a scorebook in my parents house that documents me beating them at Gridrunner when I was pre-school!), and that his games are probably the reason my boyfriend is convinced I was dropped in a large vat of drugs as a baby. :)
I also told him he should make the 1-ups in TxK look less threatening, because I avoided them twice, thinking they were projectiles. They're pink and say "1-up", but they look like bullets!
Meeting Jeff Minter and playing his new game, that's a super awesome day. But connecting on Space Giraffe, and letting him know what a great game I think it is, I felt like I had just done something to fix the world. Just a little bit. :)
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