Today is a very good day for fans of rpgs and war and detailed ways of giving your enemies nasty experiences, whether that be wandering through dark dungeon corridors delivering nasty pokings with swords, or laughing horribly as your mighty laser gun batteries pound a defenceless enemy into submission, letting you either slip on board and loot them mercilessly, or just blow the heck out of them for your glorious faction!

First off, let's take the big, blazing spaceships.

this of course means Nielsbauer's fantastic space combat game, Smugglers 4. The Blind compatibility mode is now fully fixed and running, upto and including the fleet batle screens. This means it's possible to play through the entire civil war from start to finish, gain your batle ship and take planets, and even get your new battleship class of the battlegroup, comprising a battleship and several escort vessels.

If you already have the game, please feel free to Grab yonda update patch or alternatively, if you want to know more about this fantastic game, just set course for The neils bauer home page

Unfortunately, at the moment the game is far more compatible with Hal than Jaws, though hopefully this is something which will be fixed if someone can write appropriate map files.

NExt up we can descend into the catacombs for a bit of newly enhanced, self-voicing monster slaying and questage! A brand spanking new version of Entombed, see index page has just appeared on the scene, but rather than enforce more of my rambling upon you, here's the direct announcement from Jason dingo himself:

Warning: Before you download 0.0.7 please understand that it has an
incredibly large range of new features and code. It's going to be more
unstable than you're used to. Like 0.0.6, I'll be adding mainly bug
fixes before starting again with new stuff.

Known Issues:

- Although dying returns you to the main menu, when you start a new
game it often doesn't initialize right. This means you might get
strange bugs down the track. I'll be fixing this soon, but for now,
it's best to just re-start the program after you die.
- Very rarely after combat, your pet will attack nothing and the game
will crash. If this happens to you, try to remember the circumstances
of the encounter. Who killed the last monster and how? This bug is
annoying and so rare it's difficult to track down.
- Saving right after battle sometimes causes a crash.
- The installer might take a little longer to complete as it has some
new API features.
- Nothing is balanced to any great degree. Let me know how you found
completing the quests. If you can do it as a fighter, can you also do
it as a mage, or healer? Save often to prevent game crashes from
ruining your progress.

Full patch notes - newer stuff at the bottom:

- Totally overhauled the internal data structure. Nothing like
reorganizing the guts of the program. (That was sarcasm)
- Added active (user chooses when to use them) and passive (always in
use) fighter abilities. Currently, fighters don't have to worry about
magic points, but I might need to add that in in the future. Some of
the fighter abilities are quite powerful but are balanced by increased
delay. Be careful when using all out attacks. If you don't kill the
enemy, it'll be a long time before you get your turn again.
- Abilities are now determined by the character's job. Currently, I
only have two defined for testing: Fighter and Mage. These are vanilla
jobs, I know, but they for the basis for advanced jobs - of which I
have about 30 written down. Obviously, it will be a long time before I
branch out to some of the crazier jobs. Some will be secret.
- Added preliminary character creation. You can now name your
character and choose their race and job. In the future you'll have a
little more control than this too as well as the ability to save
created characters for use in future games. Let's face it, if the
dungeon's monsters don't kill you, zombie rot will, and you might not
want to re-roll the same character every time. (Sarcasm again.)
- Added stackable items. Only common items can be stacked. Currently
reserved for potions.
- Speaking of potions, added healing potions. These heal any non-
severed limb including broken ones.
- Removed the complete heal F12 key. You can still use it to remove
Zombie Rot (at least until other methods become available)
- You can restore health and magic by resting with the R key. Mangled,
missing, and broken limbs won't be healed by resting. You can still be
attacked while resting, so use it with care.
- Dying now returns you to the main menu.
- Added experience levels. You can level up to 5 right now. This isn't
balanced in any fashion, so expect to either become a demi-god in 5
short levels or not notice any change. I need to see how well stats
scale before setting this up. Right now it's just guestimated.
Fighters level faster in physical areas where mages level faster
intellectually.
- Added cure potions. Now you can cure Zombie Rot should you be
unfortunate enough to contract it.
- Added a rescue quest. This is a minor step in fleshing out the quest
system. Whatever kill quest you get tasked with is still the main
quest, but you can optionally complete the rescue quest along the way.
- Entombed is a whole lot harder now with limited healing options. I
think I'd rate it in the 'unfair and frustrating' level of difficulty
right now. So if you get your head bitten off by a zombie before you
can even act... know that this will be finely balanced once more
skills and jobs are in. And if you manage to complete the quest,
you're incredibly lucky, skilled, or you managed to land a named hero
dog as your pet.
- Added throwing of potions. Generally throwing healing potions at
your enemies is a bad tactical choice, but it can also be useful...
(And no, I'm not going to tell you what circumstances those are)
- Added secret fun stuff. If you find anything secret, it'll probably
be more buggy than most features due to limited testing. I'll give you
a hint though, there is a new option on the main menu.
- Added the Healer job. The healer can heal, harm, and attach severed
body parts (so far)
- Added Heal spell. Heal is targetable like attacks are. If you want
to heal someone