Touch Gen is reporting that yet another platform is in for a release of Ron Gilbert's The Cave adventure game. This time it's heading for iOS. The controls have been converted to swipe and gesture based rather than the more cumbersome virtual joystick favored by many iOS ports, and the hands-on report from E3 say they work well.

The game is due to hit the App Store this Summer sometime.

Jukka Jylänki has ported ScummVM's SCUMM engine to HTML5 using enscripten.

Head over to the website and you can play demos of Maniac Mansion, Loom, The Secret of Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Day of the Tentacle, and Sam & Max Hit the Road directly in your browser!

When not Kickstarting out new games, Double Fine is, apparently, getting their games IndieFunded. Polygon brings word of two new games in the making, both being funded by IndieFund. Note the "new"; these are not Broken Age or Massive Chalice.

What more? Go to Polygon to find out. Spoiler: We pretty much just quoted the whole article.

At the E3 Gaming Expo, EA Games announced that the Battlefront franchise is getting a new installment. The 3rd Battlefront game has had a stop-start life, with several companies beginning production before they were ultimately cancelled prior to any official announcement of the game's development.




So there we go, new Battlefront is coming. Let's hope for more Star Wars story-driven games too, along the lines of Dark Forces / Jedi Knight or the X-Wing series.

The meaning behind Telltale's short Vine teasers has been revealed: it's the extra content between The Walking Dead Seasons One and Two that has been teased since February.

400 Days is Telltale's first foray into DLC (not including the original The Walking Dead episodes themselves, which were marked as DLC out of necessity on XBLA). The 400 Days downloadable content is for The Walking Dead Season One, and is one episode containing five all new stories to play through. It is scheduled to be released this summer.

A bundle for PS Vita has also been announced. The bundle will include the original 5 episodes and 400 Days for the PlayStation Vita, and is scheduled to be released this August.

IGN has posted a trailer for the 400 Days DLC, which is embedded below:

Who doesn't love a good game from Ronzo? And Scurvy Scallywags is good, but how good is it? We give it a look.

Adventure Gamers has published a new interview with Bill as his A Vampyre Story: Year One Kickstarter hobbles past $32k. It's a satisfyingly massive article covering, if I'm not mistaken, every single moment of Bill's life, including the explanation for why over twelve months separated his initial tweet about the Kickstarter and its launch last weekend. There's some art in there, too.

Go read it. Then check out the latest updates for the Kickstarter to discover that there are some new tiers available at $20 and $40. A $20 dollar pledge gets you a free copy of A Vampyre Story and its splendid soundtrack. You'd be a fool to not be all over that. And you can tell you I said so.

When Double Fine launched their Kickstarter to fund Massive Chalice, our man in San Francisco, Robert Betancourt, travelled to their offices to speak with designer Brad Muir. The result from his expedition can now be found right here.

Or over here.

Double Fine's Massive Chalice has already jumped over its $725k goal, and is on its way to do very well indeed. Not Broken Age well, but let's face it... Times have changed as far as Kickstarting games go.

Proof in the pudding is Tiller's Year One Kickstarter limping toward $20k, or 10% of its goal. We all think you owe it to Jason to make this game happen -- did you see his video?! -- and come on... It's an adventure game from Bill Tiller. It will if nothing else look gorgeous, and his introduction video is pure class. Run and Kickstart if you haven't already done so.

And finally we have Telltale teasing six seconds (and another six seconds) of what looks like it might be The Walking Dead Not Season 2 But Something To Keep Your Attention. Hey, it should be good, whatever it is.

Bill has made his first update to the Year One Kickstarter. In response to the concern that there was too big a gap between reward tiers, he has added a new one. For a $75 dollar pledge, the so-called Lake Monster tier, you get the following additional rewards:

- A large map (18” by 24”) of Draxsylvania
- PDF Atlas of Draxsylvania Atlas Book with color maps, art and descriptions of the history and geography of Draxsylvania and its macabre citizens
- Video lesson on How to Design Animated Characters the Autumn Moon Way
- A physical Sheet of A Vampyre Story Stickers

At the time of this writing the Kickstarter has reached $18.5k in pledges. That's the mathematical equivalent of stressing that they've got a long way to go, so be sure to use your disposable income to tell Bill you love him if you haven't already.

I haven't been posting much lately; we've all noticed it. The temptation will be to assume the worst of me - that I've succumbed to laziness or apathy, or outright disdain for you, specifically.

But consider:

The day has finally come. A Vampyre Story: Year One is now live on Kickstarter!

The game, which is a prequel set in the first year that Mona is captive in Castle Warg, begins when she first meets Froderick the bat. It is an episodic adventure for Windows (on Facebook, Bill Tiller mentioned that the first episode will tentatively be called Spring, with the other three being the remaining seasons of Year One), using 2D backgrounds and 3D characters with a Curse of Monkey Island style verb coin interface, just like the original game. The first episode should be about one third the size of A Vampyre Story, and have about five total hours of game play.

The Kickstarter goal is $200,000 for episode one, and (according to the afforementioned Facebook page) the other episodes could be funded through this kickstarter as well, depending on how much money is pledged.

The minimum tier with the download of the first episode is available for only $8 (with beta access included!). If you pledge higher, you'll get a digital download of Pedro Macedo Camacho's soundtrack for the game at $25, a digital artbook at $50, a special collector's "big box" version (made with the dimensions of the Curse of Monkey Island box) at $100, a hardcover art book at $500, and even more goodies at the higher premium tiers. So, choose your tier and pledge your support for this classic style adventure game.

For those of you wondering about A Vampyre Story 2: A Bat's Tale, the reason that one's not being Kickstarted is because the rights lie with the publisher, Crimson Cow. But, Bill Tiller did mention on Facebook that if this Kickstarter does well, the chances of A Vampyre Story 2 coming out soon ("fall 2014 or sooner") go way up.

LucasArts / Bioware classic RPG 'Knights of the Old Republic' is now available for the iPad. It sells for US$9.99. The game was ported by Aspyr Media, who are responsible for a number of PC-to-Mac conversions, including KOTOR.

Joystiq have reviewed the iPad version here, if you want to know what's been updated to make it work on a touchscreen.

Perhaps this bodes well for further LucasArts classics that Aspyr ported to Mac previously, such as Jedi Outcast, making their way to the iPad in due course.

ScummVM, the program that lets you play classic adventure games on modern computers, consoles, phones, and tablets, has been updated with support for four new engines, bringing support for six new games: 3 Skulls of the Toltecs, Eye of the Beholder, Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon, Hopkins FBI, Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths, and The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime.

In addition to the new games, there's support for the Macintosh version of Discworld 1. And, of most relevance to Mojo readers, music is now improved in the Macintosh version of many LucasArts adventures. If you're not interested in Macintosh versions of adventure games, this version comes with major bugfixes to the bike fight sequences on Old Mine Road in Full Throttle.

There are also other changes included as well, such as an update to the latest Roland MT-32 emulation code, a new grid chooser for save games, an extended FluidSynth configuration dialog, and Belarusian, Finnish and Galician translations for the GUI dialogs.

The Humble Weekly Sale this week is a Telltale Bundle. Pay what you want and get Back to the Future: The Game, Hector: Badge of Carnage, Poker Night 1, Puzzle Agent 1, Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse, and Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures. The games are all on PC and Mac (except for Wallace & Gromit which is PC only) for Steam and DRM-free (except, strangely Hector episode 2 (and only episode 2) for Mac, which is Steam only). You'll also get downloadable soundtracks for Hector and Puzzle Agent.

If you pay more than the average (currently less than $5 USD), you'll also get The Walking Dead for Steam.

So what is going on here? A new Double Fine Kickstarter? To Kickstart a tactical strategy PC game? Called Massive Chalice (Kickstarter)?

Well, don't read this; go read and watch the Kickstarter instead! The game, which you can Kickstart, is aimed for a September release for PC, Mac, and Linux, and is helmed by Brad Muir.

Kickstart it! At the time of writing, the project has been Kickstarted up to $9,791 of its $725,000 goal.

Some guy started a thread on NeoGAF, observing that Lucasfilm, now a Disney subsidiary, filed four trademarks for Maniac Mansion on May 22nd. You can find the USPTO links within; check out the goods and services that Disney is reserving the rights for under the Maniac Mansion name:

While this shouldn't be necessarily interpreted as evidence that Disney is about to start pumping out Green Tentacle footwear, there does seem to be an education theme, doesn't there?

A few publications have picked up on the story, and there is some speculation that Disney is giving the classic game the HD remake treatment. While we advise against that kind of optimism, the NeoGAF guy makes a decent case for why Disney must be fixing to do something with the property and that this isn't just standard trademark renewal.

Update: Bill thinks Monday Thursday.

As has been his way, Bill transmits his latest update on the A Vampyre Story: Year One Kickstarter launch via Facebook. Until the next hang-fire!

Update: May 19: I originally linked to the wrong part of the interview. Thanks to Vainamoinen on the Telltale forums for pointing out my mistake.

Remember the strange time towards the end of the run of Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures where Telltale started releasing Tales of Monkey Island before the former had even finished? According to an interview with Telltale's Ken Bruner over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, that won't be such a strange situation anymore.

Telltale is planning on releasing multiple seasons at the same time, provided that the release of The Wolf Among Us goes smoothly. They want to make sure that this release doesn't have the save bugs and other major problems that The Walking Dead had. If the release goes according to plan, they plan to release another season concurrently at some point after The Wolf Among Us launch. This seems to be a result of the expansion Telltale just recently underwent. Exactly which games will be the first to recieve this treatment is unknown at this point. Could it be the end of The Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead Season Two (similar to the aforementioned Tales situation)? Could it be a completely unannounced season? Or perhaps the bonus that's supposed to take place in The Walking Dead universe to ease the wait between seasons? It's anyone's guess at this point, but I think I speak for all of Mixnmojo in hoping that it is Sam & Max Season Four (since Tales of Monkey Island Season Two seems pretty unlikely after the Disney buyout of Lucasfilm).

There's some other interesting tidbits to be found in the second part of the interview, such as the talk of the Pilot Program. Apparently, it's still alive and well. And, pieces of the ideas appear in the games that have been released. It was previously thought to only be Telltale's spring board for testing new, quirky ideas as one episode releases to minimize risk (an idea that brought us the Puzzle Agent and Poker Night games). However, it's now been revealed that it is the name for their prototyping sessions, and that portions of these prototypes have wound up in released games. One of the most interesting things revealed is that The Walking Dead actually started out as Telltale's Pilot Program zombie prototype.

One of the factoids that is of the most importance to Mojo is the bit in the first part of the interview where Kevin Bruner talks more about how The Wolf Among Us is going to play, how different it is from The Walking Dead, and how many traditional adventure game elements are going to be in it (hint: not much, although there are going to be detective elements that are said to be as mentally challenging as traditional adventure puzzles).

Ron Gilbert is watching and commenting. Click here and be happy.