Space Pirate Trainer is good VR if you want to blast robots out of the sky

Kablam! Kablam! Kablam! I’m tempted to write just that much about Space Pirate Trainer from I-Illusions. It’s a shooter game in virtual reality, and I saw a demo of it this week in Seattle at Valve’s event for the HTC Vive virtual reality headset.

The title is one of a dozen games we saw for the Vive, which debuts in April and represents a major attempt to turn VR into a giant industry. Tech advisor Digi-Capital estimates that VR could be a $30 billion industry by 2020.

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.