PSP is a Planetarium

News from IGN

Non-games have taken us on adventures in brain training, English and even cooking. Now, the genre is shooting for the stars with Sega's latest offering, Homestar: 21st Century Navigator.



Homestar brings a planetarium to your PSP. The title features five million stars, viewable under a variety of options. You can select to view all the way up to magnitude 16, although if that's too cluttered, you're free to focus on only the bright order 1 and 2 stars. You can also chose to view natural phenomenon, with the title recreating eclipses and Aurora effects in accordance with statistical data.

As far as edutainment games are concerned, Homestar seems to stray towards the "edu" side of things. In addition to selecting different stellar bodies such as galaxies and planets for a closer visual look, you also have access to textual descriptions of everything. The software even provides background details on the history of the constellations.

The "tainment" side of things comes from the included Fantasy Theater mode. In this mode, you view a scripted tour of the planets and stars, with voiced narration filling in the details. The title includes over 15 chapters.

In developing Homestar, Sega has enlisted the help of world renowned planetarium creator Takayuki Ohira, who developed the famous Mega Star series. His role in Homestar is as supervisor, continuing the tradition of non-games having supervisors outside the game industry overseeing their production. Serving as producer at Sega is veteran Tetsuo Shinyu, who previously worked on Hundred Sword, Derbu Tsuku and Nouryoku Trainer (a PSP version of Brain Age).

Homestar is set for Japanese release on 10/19 at a budget price of 3,280 yen. The title has yet to be announced for US release.

this would be neat if you could hook it up to the gps that might come along, and then you could use it to identify stars in your area or whatever

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Originally Posted by steve-b

this would be neat if you could hook it up to the gps that might come along, and then you could use it to identify stars in your area or whatever

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damn, you should work for SEGA :)

You don't work there do you? Fancy giving me a job? :P

lol homestar

My work collegue is a star gazer type... He'd love this! :p

the gps thing is a super idea, but i have a funny feeling that we will never see it in any form of english. I wish there was a website, or every dev company had a way to tell them what games that you might like to see in the states or in the uk. if there was a good enough way to relay reliable information about this stuff they might actually send over a few more programs.

my reason for this? i want talkman usa. [:

If this didn't require me to upgrade, I'd buy this! It sounds cool, and I've always loved science and stars!

Agreed I like the sound of this and would buy it if shipped to UK