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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Gyaack! I recently became aware that Internet Explorer (both 6 and 7) doesn’t always display this page properly if you display it at certain widths. I’ll try and fix that at some stage - it’s probably just a hidden CSS quirk. In the meantime I can only re-emphasise my recommendation of using Firefox - it’s faster, better, and displays this page perfectly

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…

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…

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!

Ah yes! A tweak here and a tweak there - it’s all coming together quite nicely now.

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).

Goodness gracious. August really has been a slow month! Yet it’s somehow managed to pass so quickly. Damn you, real life, for stealing away my free time!

Ahem. Yes, so, despite the appaling lack of updates last month, you can check the updated Mordor: Return to Dejenol front page for some small gist of what’s been going on, and while you’re there, take a peek at the development progress page to see a more detailed breakdown of last month’s coding (sorry it took so long to get updated). Things are moving forwards!

A big thanks must go to James Monkman and the other intrepid team members behind the latest and (dare I say) leetest issue of RGCD. Issue 3 of the downloadable retro discmag contains a whopping 29 reviews and 6 articles, their most content-filled production yet. In the selection of reviewed games just happens to be Millenipede, scoring quite respectably. In its review, James says:

…the game performs brilliantly as a short and rewarding distraction from work.

For the full lowdown, and of course a smashing round-up of the other excellent retro releases of the past couple of months, follow this ‘ere link to go straight to the RGCD download page.

Though I dislike mentioning stuff that isn’t freeware on these pages, I do want to give a passing mention to Guild Wars: Eye of the North, the just-released expansion pack for the rather fab free-to-play competitive RPG Guild Wars. Truth be told, it’s what has kept me from updating the site as much as I should have last month… Well, that and the early release of Knytt Stories, I suppose. Everybody should play KS - it’s like pie, after all, and everybody likes pie, right?
‘Til next time, then - watch out for marmots!