It’s rare for you to hear any really juicy Firestorm news, seeing as I tend to include a lot of… um… “padding”, shall we say, made up of tidbits you’ve probably seen and heard before on other sites. Happily, today is no exception! Or is it?… <insert dramatic tension here>

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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After this long without a news update, it’s sort of hard to give a decent explanation why I’ve not posted sooner. There are lots of entirely uninteresting reasons, but none of them are actually important or terrible enough to have prevented me from typing a few words into Wordpress. So, first off, I want to say sorry for the break.

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…

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!