Space Stuff

I've been following the news on Spacetime Studio's space combat MMO named Blackstar.

NCSoft cancelled funding of the project earlier this year, but Spacetime recently reaquired the IP.

Now there is an interview up over at Massively about the game. There is also plenty more information at the official site.

It will be really interesting to see if Spacetime can pull this off after the break with NCSoft. The references to Wing Commander and Descent were what intrigued me in the first place.

I'm kind of in the sci-fi mood this week as I've been playing R-Type Command for the PSP. When I heard they took this side-scrolling shooter franchise and turned it into an SRPG of sorts, I was fascinated by the pure weirdness of it. Sure enough, the game plays more like Fire Emblem or maybe Advance Wars then any previous R-Type game.

Even weirder is that it's actually a pretty good game. I haven't finished it yet but I'm enjoying the strategic fun. Everything is very well done - I like that they included basically the entire manual in the game under a Help option. I wish more games would do that as I always lose the manual. The only problem I've had is that the loading times for the full-screen animations are very long (it seems like loading times are always an issue with the PSP). But you can put them in a window or turn them off entirely. It's a challenging strategy game and the setting feels fresh to me after so many fantasy SRPG's like FF Tactics, Jeanne D'arc and Disgaea.