“Goodness deary gracious!” is all I can say. Between recently becoming the owner of a Nintendo DS and getting continually distracted by a *coff* certain online game *coffWoWcoff*, I’d barely noticed that so many weeks had flown by…

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!