The player is in a small scout vessel exploring a "dark" area in space. No normal scanners work here so the ships must use a very powerful active scanner (the technical name is Pinger) to detect things in their surrounding. The use of the Pinger can be detected from a long range, putting the user in danger if enemies are near. But if you don't use it you can't see...
Controls are WASD (no need to hold W) and SPACE triggers the Pinger. To fire missiles click somewhere in the window. If you click on a visible enemy the missile will track it, otherwise it'll detonate in the area you clicked. Use WASD or arrow keys to navigate the menus. Enter selects an option.
The game was developed for Windows using C# in VS2010 with XNA 4.0, so you'll need the .NET and XNA frameworks to play. Graphics were done with Paint.NET and sounds with sfxr. Font used (Quartz MS) is one of those included in the XNA framework.
Edit2: Added link to a new version. Only difference is that you now can control the ship with the arrow keys as well as WASD, and the pinger can be activated with the right mouse button as well as Space.
Edit3: The "arrow keys" version has been updated and should be using XNA's Reach profile. This means it should now run on non DirectX 10 GPU's.
Hmm.. Do you have XNA 4,0? I managed to get it working on a second computer (32bit vista, dev computer is 64bit win7) after installing the 4.0 runtime. Trying with 3.1 failed.
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http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=a88c6dec-aeae-42cd-a108-d35c013c3b97&displaylang=en
I'll see about making a setup pack if the problem persists.
Very interesting game, and some smart AIs in there... Good job.