The International House of Mojo

People of France take note: Ron Gilbert has updated his blog with news that on March 4th he will be traveling to your homes, or at least a major city which possibly contains some of your homes. From his digital mouth:

We'll meet up on Saturday, March 4th at 2:00 pm. I don't know where yet, but we'll need to find a place that allows adventure gamers. Not sure what Paris is like, but in the States those places are hard to find these days.

I'm open to suggestions. Food, drink and stinky cheese are a must. Clayton and I are looking forward to seeing everyone there.

If you're interested in meeting up with Gilbert to totally dork out - French style - about Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion (and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure Edition if you're really hardcore about things), be sure to make your presence known in this blog post to inquire about details.

Italian LucasArts fansite Lucasdelirium has scored a new interview with music composer and ex-LucasArts employee Peter McConnell.*

The interview discusses his work on specific titles like Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island 2, Fate of Atlantis, more general LucasArts subjects like his work on the iMuse interactive music system used in most of LucasArts' classic adventures, and touches on what he's up to now. As a bonus to non-Italians, the interview's even in English! Check it out.

* The horrible pun involved in the concept of "scoring an interview with a musician" was unintentional. Apologies all around.

All the screenshots released from 3 Dimensions of Murder have thus far been confirmed to be either packaging images or works-in-progress, however a few more have popped up at online retailers that seem to be in-game and are probably closer to real screenshots. The game's release is in only a few weeks and the official web site has got to be posted soon, so we won't have long to wait to validate them.

The plot thickens. Take a look. Also Graham Annable's Dank the Caveman got himself an update as well after a lengthy hiatus.

Adventure Gamers, one of the highest rated places to steal content from, has totally got some new screenshots from Bone: The Great Cow Race, and it's looking really great. How about the faithful rendering of the Barrelhaven Tavern regulars, eh? Or the great expanded environment from Thorn's dream? How can I have ever previously lived in a world where these screenshots didn't exist?

Update: Adventure Gamers has just published a great, highly-informative hands-on preview for the game! Everyone loves Adventure Gamers!

Source: AG

Hey, remember the Wondercon last Friday that was posted about? The one where Telltale showed up and hosted a panel? Wasn't that great? Oh, you didn't attend? I guess you just had something unbelievably more important to do that day.

If it were up to me I'd leave you curious about what happened so that you might learn your lesson. But the kindly souls at Telltale decided to make this week's blog a semi-accurate transcript of the occurrences at the panel. The high points are two new screenshots from the upcoming The Great Cow Race, one of Phoney scheming outside the woodshed and the other of Lucius in the tavern. Man that image of Lucius is a relief.

Is it wrong that I find this so funny?

If you, like me, have tried to play Grim Fandango with anti-aliasing on, you have probably noticed that it doesn't work well. In fact, it ends up looking slightly ridiculous. Thrik, ever the explorer, took matters into his own hands, and found that despite popular belief, it is fixable. At least with Nvidia cards.

This might be the perfect excuse to play up some Grim again.

Good news everybody! Lost Cause won a couple of highly prestigious awards. To be precise, it won two!

And whilst I?m on the subject of community events, I thought I?d mention a rumour reported by The Department of Death: seems that an anonymous tipster e-mailed the web-master about Grim Fandango 2 being in the works. There?s almost certainly no truth in the claim, but it's always fun to speculate anyway.

A new version of ScummVM has just been released. ScummVM 0.8.2 consists mainly of bugfixes and can be downloaded here.

Its real this time. After a 10 month wait, a number of aborted release dates and lots of forum moaning Psychonauts has finally been released in the UK.

You can buy it online at Play, Game, or Amazon and Huz reports that Gamestation have the Xbox and PS2 versions in store right now, priced at ?30.00.

Update: The game is also apparently available in Norway. This review gave it a 6/6.

While waiting for the official web site for 3 Dimensions of Murder (which I'm told will be at the URL csitdm.ubi.com) to launch, you can tide yourself over by checking out its product page which was quietly added to the Ubisoft online store. Particularly of interest is that it includes the first two screenshots from the game. I have to say I like the graphics quite a bit, but be sure to tell me your obviously better opinion below.

The page also contains Ubisoft's descriptions and features of the game, and you can of course use it to pre-order your PC copy right now. The release date is March 21st, so we'll be crackin' cases with Grissom and co. soon. I recommend buying the game as soon as possible, because you'll want to get all that propriety out of your investigation techniques by the time Sam and Max roll around.

Telltale reports that key members of its team as well as Steve Purcell himself will be appearing at the San Francisco Wondercon on Friday to present a panel discussing the process of adapting stories to an interactive medium. Read the whole entry here. Those in the area are commanded to attend so that they might share what went on, especially since Great Cow Race stuff is supposed to be shown.

After taking on all the risk on the quirky LEGO Star Wars game last year and pulling off an estimated amazing 3 million units in worldwide sales, publishers Eidos have been cut out of the action on the recently revealed LEGO Star Wars 2 (Original Trilogy) game according to this report on IGN.

A glarey magazine scan confirming details of the game (building your own vehicles, fully customisable playable characters etc.) featuring a LEGO X-Wing skimming the Death Star surface and a wonderful homage to the original iconic Hildebrandt Star Wars poster is being pulled from various gaming and LEGO sites by crack legal teams right now. You may still find it floating around various forum threads if you're lucky.

Source: IGN

Oh how we were angry when LucasArts president laid off screeds of employees, dropped all internally produced titles, cancelled bonuses and rushed games out to coordinate them with big Star Wars events such as movie and DVD releases.

But, from a financial standpoint at least, those decisions have turned out to be a godsend for the formerly struggling Lucas division. The San Francisco Business Times reports;

The San Franicisco-based video game unit of Lucasfilm produced record-breaking sales last year, generating praise for Jim Ward, who became president in May 2004 and immediately retooled the formerly flagging company.

LucasArts had long been criticized for relying on overused "Star Wars" material for its games, but 2005 turned out to be stellar time for any game based on the sci-fi franchise. "Star Wars" titles accounted for four of the five top-selling Hollywood-licensed games in North America last year, according to industry tracker NPD Group. The same four titles were the only movie-based games to push into the overall top 10.

So, with all that money rolling in, it must be a good time to finally get cracking on Monkey Island 5. Right? Right?

Source: San Francisco Business Times