Minter: "Still a taste for old-style games"

Space Giraffe developer Jeff Minter believes old-school game design should be able to coexist with modern blockbusters.

Speaking to Eurogamer after the launch of Space Giraffe on PC yesterday, Minter speculated that XNA Community Games and similar initiatives may even spark a resurgence.

"There is still a taste for old-style games," he told us. "If you look at stuff like LittleBigPlanet, which I was just playing the other day, it's basically a 2D platform game with physics. If you did that as an entirely 2D game it would still be enjoyable.

"Perhaps things like XNA will allow smaller projects to still survive and perhaps thrive. It would be a shame to lose them entirely. The older game forms are still valid game forms, in the same way that when film came along it didn't banish books, I don't see why 3D should banish 2D.

"It would be nice to keep them all alive and keep them all relevant," he added.

Minter went on to say that one thing "missing from the modern user experience" was the ability to program for the hardware, which results in us taking "what's dolled out".

The 3D graphics arms race is also to blame, and to the detriment of gameplay, said Minter, although he foresees a less dramatic shift in graphics from this generation to the next.

And he had lots more to say to us about his farm, his next XBLA game Gridrunner+++, his favourite console, and turning sheep into reindeer in our full interview published today.