“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!

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…

Today I finished converting the Millenipede and Poing! PC pages into the new site format, which is cool - it’s been slow in happening (isn’t eveything with Firestorm? ) but better late than never.

Meantime, the world waits in hushed anticipation for the release of the first new version of Dwarf Fortress in over nine months - and judging by the stuff Bay 12 Games have been talking about on their development log, it’s going to be even more staggeringly detailed than ever before, despite its old version being a masterpiece in its own right. At some point today, the updated download link will hopefully appear. Edit: It’s out now, so go and enjoy a new ASCII-filled adventure!

Erp. Seems like the site had some downtime yesterday - at least, I paid my daily visit and couldn’t get in. I’ll keep an eye on things and be ready to harass the hosting people if it happens again.

I’ll (maybe) post some proper news tomorrow. Meantime I’m off to hack some more code into mah computer box…

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).

After a mad typing frenzy, most of the old site’s pages have been re-added - the only thing missing is the page for Oil’s Well Redrilled, and I’ll deal with that tomorrow. I’d also better put the Fellow Developers banner links back soon, otherwise people might start shouting at me - and that makes me sad Later still I’ll think about some “titivation”, like adding some fancy whizzbang gadgets to the sidebar. But that’s for a spare moment of boredom… there’s plenty more important work to get done first!

The question that’s probably at the front of your mind is something like “Why on earth was September such a quiet month?” - well, amongst other things that were happening in the otherworldly place known as “Real Life™“, I was hauled off to do jury service. Now although it’s a very important and valued civil duty (at least that’s what it said in the paperwork… ), it doesn’t exactly fit in well with computer programming. To make matters worse, my laptop decided to die on me for the second time with a graphics fault, and this time it’s no longer in warranty. Cue lots of enlightening discussions with Dell’s technical support boffins. Fortunately the part it needs is relatively inexpensive - just today the order was confirmed, so within a week it should be working again. Hurrah! Will the optimism work? Answer: of course it will, haha!

Lastly, for no apparent reason, I’m enclosing a picture of a marmot. Because frankly, they just don’t get enough press coverage these days. Yes, you’re right… I’m quite mad

At last, the Firestorm Productions website enters a new age of… erm… newness! Yes! As you can see, the not-hyped-at-all renovation of the website has been put online. The construction process is partly why there have been so few updates lately, although there was at least one other reason for that (which I’ll explain later).

This brave new world of Wordpress is brimming with features which I’ll probably never use - but some of them were actually worth the effort…

• The site doesn’t have to rely on a bulky forum just to display news items
• It’s easier and tidier for visitors to post comments and view content through RSS
• I can maintain and update stuff in half the time it took before
• Adding pointless bullet lists is easier than ever
• Oh yes, and it can still do smilies!

I’m hoping that the speed of the site will be smoother, if not necessarily faster, due to another change in web hosts; the old one appeared to be overselling quite badly, and when I tried this Wordpress installation, page load times frequently were above the 10 second mark. More than long enough to drive away the scant few visitors Firestorm gets…

Anyhow, enjoy the new look. Sorry about the lack of content right now… there was only so much I could prepare offline, so expect the game pages to look a bit out of place until I can fit them into the new layout. That aside, I hope you have a pleasant browsing experience!

Meep!

Do not adjust your internet in any way if you find the site is behaving even more strangely than usual. A redesigned website is imminent, as well as (yet another) switch in webhosts.

And very soon afterwards I’ll try to give you some idea of why things have been so s-l-o-w lately…