Marvellously, my favourite top-down arena shoot ‘em up of all time has finally had its shiny new Deluxe version released! Yes indeed, I’m talking about Chase Ace, Space Time Foam’s spifftastic blaster. Featuring a unique graphical style and gameplay faster than a speeding giraffe, you’re bound to have fun either alone or with friends over a local network. Although there are still some minor glitches that will hopefully get fixed in the coming weeks, it’s brilliant to be able to enjoy the game again - and with some entirely new features, too! Go forth and check out the demo.

Elsewhere on the interweb, May’s award for “most brilliantly titled game” goes to Attack of the Meeplings. Even if it is a fairly unremarkable java browser shmup, the name still earns it a mention. Then there’s Rom Check Fail, a chaotic mix of pretty much every old console classic you can think of - I’ve not played it myself, but the people who have seem to reckon it’s a right good blast. Voxelstein 3D deserves a look, if only to see how great voxels could be if only they were hardware accelerated. And if you’re into something a bit more cerebral, POWDER is an excellent freeware Roguelike RPG for Windows, GBA / DS and PSP owners that’s been steadily developing over several years.

Following the rather epic “state of Firestorm” post back in March, things have been rather quiet. There are a couple of bits and bobs chugging away in the background which will probably see their first light of day within the next month. Enigmatic, yes? But I’m sure you know not to expect too much by now! More details to come soon.

For now, happy gaming and long live retro!

To kick things off, an announcement that a new version of Millenipede is available - v1.1.1 fixes a few bugs and is more of a maintenance release to prepare for “other stuff”. You can see the full list of changes right here. The headline features are in the audio department; the laggy sound effects on some PCs have been cured, and the Mac version should now support mod music, meaning no more bulky .ogg files - but doing a Mac compile is turning out to be more troublesome than before, so ironically it may be a short while before a Mac version is actually ready for download… Still, all you Windows users can enjoy this lovely direct download right now.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to set things out for the rest of the year, I thought it might be good to post some decisions, ideas and rough plans that may see the light of day over the course of 2008. Yes folks, a news update with real news in it! Whatever next? Unfortunately, not all of it is good news.

With that somewhat pessimistic disclaimer out of the way, let’s get on with it, eh?
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Hrmm. Where to start? There’s been lots of indie scene news over the past two-ish months…

• The site previously known as Independent Gaming has changed and is now IndieGames.com. The site was bought by the same group that runs Gamasutra and Game Set Watch, among others. Fortunately, Tim remains a prominent member of the staff there, so you’ll still get the excellent quality updates that IndyGamer was famous for.
• Winners of the 2008 Independent Games Festival were announced, with Crayon Physics Deluxe getting the top prize. Awards were also given to puzzling build-em-up World of Goo and gorgeous trixel-filled platformer, Fez (my personal favourite).
• Dwarf Fortress saw a major new feature - Mac support! Tarn Adams has also been busily adding new features along the so-called “Army Arc”, where civilisations will get up close and personal in some frighteningly in-depth ways. You’d never believe that ASCII gaming could go so far. Fans of the game may also be interested in a recent “Making of Dwarf Fortress” interview that Tarn gave.
• The team behind Chase Ace Deluxe are still working hard and have posted a couple of gameplay videos on this blog post. Can’t wait for this one to see the light of day again!

That lot is only the tip of the icy wossname, um, you know, like the thing that sunk the Titanic… iceberg! Yep, that was it. Follow those links through the interweb far enough and you’re bound to come across everything else that I’ve not mentioned. Good times.

Coming very soon will be some proper news on how Firestorm’s current projects stand, as well as some details of what new stuff 2008 might bring. All I’ll say is that there are, in the words of an old Chinese curse, “interesting times” ahead. But for now, I’ll sign off and hope that your holiday season and New Year (Chinese or otherwise!) went well. ‘Til next time…

Since it’s coming up to the festive season, I’d love to be able to give you some happy news about Mordor: Return to Dejenol, but instead I must gloomily admit that there’s almost no chance of seeing an “Alpha 1″ version this year. Real life is going to become increasingly busy for me toward Christmas and, though it’s a weak excuse, being stuck in a mire of drab editor coding doesn’t improve my enthusiasm for the project during the limited free time I’ll get

Still, chin up - for fans of Dejenol-style gameplay, there’s always the upcoming expansion to Demise. Known as Ascension, it will add a huge section of deeper dungeons for you to explore, as well as fixing a good number of bugs. A plain patch is also being worked on that contains a similar wagon of bugfixes plus some useful cosmetic changes. Mordor XP should have a new bi-monthly update available soon, too, so as usual keep your eyes peeled on Braindead’s Mordor Page for word on that.

Meanwhile, it’s an exciting weekend in Indieland with Bit Blot’s IGF 2007 darling Aquaria having been released yesterday and the first purchasable release of Cortex Command expected imminently hitting the internet today (visit the Data Realms dev log for full details). To top it off, at the end of last month, I was lucky enough to discover news that my favourite arcade arena shooter was back in development under the auspicious title of Chase Ace Deluxe! Wootage! See, it’s not all bad…

I’ve just updated the Mordor: Return to Dejenol progress log, but don’t be having any hopes of seeing anything of spectacular interest - all it shows is that the editor coding is moving forwards, ever forwards, at rather hesitant intervals With, oh, 43 or so days left in this year, time is fast running out for the oft-promised first alpha version of the game to be released. Something big is going to have to be pulled out of a pretty magical hat, and I’m no Paul Daniels / David Copperfield / [insert favourite magician name here] - only time will tell

In the meantime, remember, if you’re a fan of Avatar, Mordor or Demise, you’ll want to keep half an eye on the Mordor XP project, especially their bi-monthly updates (link goes to the project’s public forums). A lot of bugfixes and new features have already been added - and all based on the original M:DoD source code. Remember though that just like Return to Dejenol, it’s a spare time project, so don’t hassle them for a release date unless you’re willing to be told to… um… “take a hike”

Speaking of magic, my recent forays into the realms of map editing for Valve’s recent smash hit Team Fortress 2 have led me to believe that the whole thing is an extremely dark art. Great fun, but you soon end up with a wireframe mess that even the producers of Tron would be proud of - after a while it becomes slightly hard to see what you’re doing…

Oh well. Posting this was a pleasant diversion, but I’d best get back to the coding

The past few weeks have seen quite a torrent of quality freeware games released - aside from Ovine by Design’s Exile II and Graham Goring’s Wizball, you can now also get your hands on Trilby: The Art of Theft if you like a bit of stealthy platforming, and DarkSide for some glossy arcade action.

As far as Firestorm’s own games go, I received an email just the other day from Christian over at Curly’s World of Freeware telling me about a bit of coverage for Poing! PC. It’s almost a year old, but in the fine tradition of blowing Firestorm’s own trumpet, I can’t resist quoting the brief summary:

Flawless execution, fast paced gameplay, can’t add anything - strongly recommended!

Frequent visitors will notice that once again I’ve been neglecting to update the progress log of Mordor: Return to Dejenol, but you should see the current state of play over this coming weekend. Sorry… I’m hopeless, what can I say!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some sheep to rescue…

Meantime, the world waits in hushed anticipation for the release of the first new version of Dwarf Fortress in over nine months - and judging by the stuff Bay 12 Games have been talking about on their development log, it’s going to be even more staggeringly detailed than ever before, despite its old version being a masterpiece in its own right. At some point today, the updated download link will hopefully appear. Edit: It’s out now, so go and enjoy a new ASCII-filled adventure!

With that sporting bulletin out of the way, time for some proper news about the current state of Mordor: Return to Dejenol. As usual there’s nothing to report that really pushes the envelope in terms of excitement; editors and GUIs aren’t exactly thrilling things. Grinding onwards, work on the Guilds editor panel is moving fairly well and should start having functionality added to it during the coming days.

Some interesting indie releases, too, this week: Battleships Forever is a real-time strategy game that has some very detailed combat and damage mechanics, and Space Capstar II is a smoothly-executed flash game similar to Thrust. Both are worth taking a peek at. Also, though they’ve been out for a while, you might want to browse the entrants to IGF 2008 that were recently announced.

Last, but most certainly not least, Retro Remakes have put their brand spanking new Showcase online. If you’ve been missing the A to Z list of remakes since they redesigned their pages a while back, fear not, because now you’ll be able to find what you are looking for in double quick time. Kudos to Oddbob and The Codex for their coding wizardry!

I’ll (maybe) post some proper news tomorrow. Meantime I’m off to hack some more code into mah computer box…

Mordor: Return to Dejenol is inching forwards in fits and spurts. Revealed exclusively on its homepage last week, some new art (shown on the right) was created for the intro sequence, and the editor’s Guild interface will start being pieced together once some tweaks to the record ID system have been made. There’s still so much to do… best be cracking on with it, eh?

I re-added the Fellow Developer section and am looking out for a Wordpress poll widget that won’t take too much effort to customise so that it fits in with the site theme. Typically, this has turned out to be more difficult than it sounds Can’t be without it, though, ‘cos I know you all really miss the utterly pointless polls each month!

A little bird on the Retro Remakes forums tells me that Ovine by Design is nearly ready to release the hotly anticipated Exile II onto an unsuspecting audience really soon. A brave platoon of beta testers have been assembled who should be squishing the last of its bugs as I write this, so with any luck the rest of us won’t have long to wait until we get our paws on a cracking remake of a tremendous game. Also released to a completely different set of testers was Dr. Derek’s Wizball remake. The original was a blast, so it’ll be good to see an up-to-date version some time in the next week or so (if we’re lucky).