People may be aware that the vlog for Newtopia hasn't been updated in some time now. This is a sure sign that I'm not actually working on it.

There are, in fact, three reasons:

1) School. I'm going into my final week of my Math 12 night course, and since (unlike the first time) I want to get a damned good grade, I've been doing my homework and studying!

2) Disinterest. I'm in a sci-fi gaming mode at the moment, which is punctuated and explained by the next reason, which is:

3) Starshatter: The Gathering Storm. Buy it. I'm serious. Buy it. If you've been upset that space flight sims have entered the niche market and have not been developed by any of the major developers (ignoring the fact that Atari and Ubisoft will own all of the other developers within the next couple of years...), this will at least assuage some of those blues: Starshatter TGS is the very best indie space flight sim ever, especially because it can be whatever you want it to be. Want Wing Commander? Set flight mode to Arcade. Done! Want Terminus? Set flight mode to Realistic. Done!

"But wait, I don't like space shooters!" you say. But there's a solution there, too... take command of a starship instead of a fighter and play a more powerful version of Homeworld. Command fighters, issue orders to the other capital ships serving under you in your squadron, and in all other respects make a huge mess of things in one of the game's coolest features... the dynamic campaign system.

The dynamic campaign system takes some explaining. It doesn't invent a storyline -- that's beyond any computer. But what it does do is fill in all of the blanks of the storyline by randomly generating missions to support the storyline. You, as a lowly fighter pilot or squadron leader, follow your orders and do your best to win the war. What's more, you do it with a limited number of fleet assets that don't magically resurrect for the next mission. If you lose a fighter, that fighter is lost forever, making the next mission a little more difficult.

For instance, I'll explain the little bit of the story that's also in the demo of the old Starshatter (so the Starshatter demo on Starshatter.com is not the new Starshatter TGS... I'm not sure why they haven't released a new demo either, but now you know). In the first part of Operation Highland, the legitimate government of the Independent System of Solus requests aid from the Terellian Alliance (that's you), running a blockade of the Dentarian Separatist Movement in order to bring this message to the Alliance. The Separatists (misnomer notwithstanding) want the Independent System to become a member state of the Marakan Hegemony.

The Terellian Alliance, having more than a few of its citizens attending the University in orbit of one of the Solusan planets, agrees to help eliminate the unlawful blockade of the dangerous terrorist faction and mobilises one carrier group as well as two destroyer groups to take down the blockade and allow humanitarian aid to reach the population. So your very first objective is simple: destroy the anti-freighter mines around the Trellis-Solus farcaster (jump gate). But that's not just one sortie, and it's not just one scripted mission to take out those mines. In fact, it takes at least two days of game time (that's at least four to five sorties) before the mines are taken out. You can serve in the attack squadron to destroy the mines or you can serve in the intercept squadron to run sweeps of the local sector, picking off enemy fighters while the attack squadron does its thing and eliminates the mines on its own. The game has an AI system and you're just one soldier in a large war -- the Archon (your carrier) launches sorties of all kinds all the time, and while you have first pick for the missions you take, you can also just choose the more relaxing shuttle escort and sweep missions and let the rest of your squadron do the dirty work. Of course, in this initial part of the conflict, things are slow, with tiny little dogfights and skirmishes here or there, but the action quickly heats up as time goes on. You'll see. You'll see.

If you aren't aware of Starshatter's history, it was released in the 2000 era as an indie game. It lacked any polish, but it was damned fun. As version numbers increased, Starshatter went all the way to version 4.0.0, and then took a new step: Matrix Games and Destroyer Studios got together some folks and decided to polish up the game and rebrand it under a new label, Starshatter: The Gathering Storm. While in the most stringent terms it's just a revamped version of the old game, it is, in effect, so much more; new graphics, new 3D models of just about everything, game balancing out the wazoo, a big suite of audible voices instead of just the old text messages, and to round it out, scripted cutscenes that showcase the news as it happens instead of just plain "intel" files that take independent reading to learn the real situation (because we all know how much humans hate learning things on their own).