Raylight Studios Still Shining Bright

It's been more than a year since we've checked in with Raylight, but they've been keeping busy. After R-Type and Wing Commander Prophecy Advance, the team moved on to Ozzy & Drix, Spiderman 2 and Smashing Drive for the Game Boy Advance. More recently, the team developed the GBA version of Street Racing Syndicate and the GBA and DS versions of Big Mutha Truckers. And in just the last few weeks, Raylight became an official Sony PSP developer. Their first title will be based on the Hot Wheels franchise. As the most recent studio to develop a Wing Commander game, they continued Origin's legacy by combining unbelievable graphics with solid space combat action and a sci-fi storyline. Although they only had simple handheld hardware to deal with, their accomplishments would have been unimaginable in 1997 when the original Prophecy was released. Despite the lack of buttons, they managed to retain the style of play and even incorporated a multiplayer mode. Wingnuts who are fans of handheld games and haven't yet played Raylight's GBA port are missing out. Amazon.com still maintains stock at $14.99. We'd like to wish the team good luck on their PSP projects, and we're sure they'll turn out some impressive games to take advantage of the advanced hardware. The first two links below lead to small videos of Prophecy Advance in action.

Walks Like A Duck

The WarCry Network reports that Destination Games has released the new logo for their upcoming Tabula Rasa. Tabula Rasa is the post-Origin return to game development for Ultima creator Richard Garriott. The game recently underwent a highly publicized setting shift from traditional fantasy to futuristic science fiction war (here). WarCry notices - and we agree! - that the game's new logo looks very familiar...

Making the logo resemble an upside-down Wing Commander logo is a good thing. Makes me feel good about this game, that no one really has any idea about. What have they done to it? Last year at E3 it was a Planetside clone. The year before that it had fairies that flew around in space or something. Really, just give us Privateer Online already. I don't care who has to be paid what to get it done, just do it.