Greetings again! Hope you had a good weekend.

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

Flibble mah wibble! Or something like that. Time for some bloggy-posty goodness…

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…