Game On! Space Sport G-Ball Now Slamming Thunderballs

The future of sports, some say, will see families crowding into stadiums to hoot and holler and cheer for digital sports. This is, of course, complete tosh. Pity these people and their lack of imagination. No, the future of sports will involve motorbikes and knives and low-gravity and boobytraps and cyborgs and fabulous prizes. Starlite Astronaut Academy: G-Ball may not have all that but it is looking in the right direction.

Made "in conjunction with NASA" and released yesterday, G-Ball is a zero-gravity mix of basketball, American football, and dodgeball and oh, if only I could get the demo to stop crashing.

It's a 3v3 futuresport about leaping around the inside of a zero-g sphere, lobbing 'thunderballs' at the goal and the other team. I'd love to tell you more about it, but the demo on its Steam page crashes every time I try to join a match. Perhaps you'll have better luck.

If we can't play the game ourselves, all we'll have to go on is this shockingly ill-pitched trailer, wherein a rad fictional gamer enthuses about "stiff jumps and sweet throws." The game certainly looks stiff but is that on purpose?

G-Ball's £2.09 for the next week. Maybe it doesn't look that hot, but it's part of something interesting. G-Ball will, in time, be part of the larger Starlite Astronaut Academy project. It's a multiplayer affair being made by Project Whitecard Studios with NASA's support to foster interest in the sciences amongst kids--kids who are far too clever to fall for that rad gamer persona oh good grief what even is that. Anyway. Another standalone part, Astronaut Rescue is already out. It seems components are being split-off and sold separately as minigames while still in development, ahead of the whole shebang entering alpha some time this summer.