Blizzard announced today that Swingin' Ape Studios will continue work on the upcoming tactical-action console game, StarCraft: Ghost. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed. Swingin' Ape studios is best known for Metal Arms: Glitch in the System... because that's the only game the studio has developed.

"The team at Swingin' Ape Studios is a very talented group of developers with a proven ability to deliver extraordinary games," stated Mike Morhaime, Blizzard Entertainment president and co-founder, who probably should have used the singular "game" instead of the plural "games." "We're confident that this partnership will result in titles that achieve the level of quality that players have come to expect from Blizzard products."

StarCraft: Ghost has seen a long and rocky development cycle, even for a Blizzard product, since the announcement of the project in 2002. First, the game missed its first expected release date of 2003. More recently, the game has seen a major redesign. Late last month, the game was delayed again (this time until 2005), and it was announced that Nihilistic was off of the StarCraft: Ghost project, the stated reason being that Nihilistic had another contractual obligation in the months ahead. Swingin' Ape Studios inherits a project that by most outsiders appraisal looks mostly complete, but given Blizzard's high standards, could see another major overhaul by the time things are all said and done.