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…

Like a fair few other people around the UK, I spent last night watching the tense finale of the 2007 Rugby World Cup. Considering that our England boys were absolutely crushed by South Africa the last time we played them, the end result was actually pretty fair and nothing to be disappointed by. Still, in the second half, I can’t help but say anything other than “What?! Ref, that was a try!” Final score: South Africa 15 - 6 England. Make sure you enjoy it, ‘cos we want it back in 2011!

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!