The International House of Mojo

Bill Tiller's latest tweet will be of great interest to fans:

Brain storming ideas fir Ghost Pirates and the Galleon of Doom! Fun fun fun!

Now, even assuming a sequel to Ghost Pirates has been greenlit by a publisher, the fact that they're "brain storming" would make a release pretty distant. Still, exciting!

A development recently alerted to the world by The Pumpkin Post is the fact that Pedro Macedo Camacho, the composer responsible for the film quality soundtracks of both of Autumn Moon's games, has relaunched his online presence at http://www.musicbypedro.com/.

Why do you care? Well, for one thing, Pedro has posted several tracks from his A Vampyre Story and Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island scores for your enjoyment. In fact, I don't know that the entire soundtrack for both games isn't on there. To listen, navigate to "Projects" under the "Music" menu item on the top of the page, then choose your game on the left. (The Flashy nature of the site prevents me from providing a more direct link.) How awesome is that?

Given the amount of people who seem to be waiting on the digital version of Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island, I figured I'd ask Mamba Games, the UK publisher, if they had any kind of status they were at liberty to share on that front. Here's what they got back to me with:

Thank you for your email. The download should be available from our site within the next 3 weeks, or if you order off the website we will ship direct to you.

So there you go. If you're willing to sit tight for a bit longer, you can get Ghost Pirates in a format as non-corporeal as the game's protagonists. If you can't hold out (and who could blame you?), you have the usual options open to you.

Back when it was originally announced, Ghost Pirates seemed poised as a humble comeback for the fantasy pirate adventure game, and today it drowns helplessly in an angry ocean of Monkey Island resurgence. But now the English version of Bill Tiller's all-new swashbuckling romp is available, and we're here to tell you our opinion, which is, of course, always right. Read!

As those who've played it (a populace which I'm thankful to announce now includes me!) are well aware, Autumn Moon's regular composer, the super-talented Pedro Macedo Camacho, assembled another excellent score with his music for Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, the pirate song that the game opens with (essentially its version of "A Pirate's Life for Me") ended up being truncated, so Pedro came to the rescue by providing the Post with the complete version of the song along with the lyrics.

Even more exciting is that Pedro suggests that wheels are in motion in order to get an official soundtrack album of Ghost Pirates released, and if that doesn't happen, he will offer it himself for free. I like the cut of that man's treble clef.

Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island, the latest game from Bill Tiller's Autumn Moon Entertainment, has been played and reviewed, by firm but loving website Adventure Gamers.

They have given the game a respectable three-and-a-half stars, which you may recall being the same score they bestowed upon Tales of Monkey Island chapters one and two. That's a good thing.

However, if that doesn't seem like much to you, then keep in mind Autumn Moon is still a young, struggling studio. Both Telltale and LucasArts had their share of misfires before hitting their stride. Ghost Pirates is relatively cheap at £17.59; it's even cheaper at £13.41 from Amazon marketplace sellers. I think that's worth the beautiful backgrounds, at least; and you're supporting a company with the potential to make great adventure games.

Update by Jason: Additional reviews: Electronic Theater, GameBoomers.

Source: Adventure Gamers

According to the Mamba twitter feed, Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island is now available at UK retailers, with its ship date having been Wednesday. Now we can all play Autumn Moon's latest with English voices, and all is well.

If, like me, you're in North America, your options are to get the game imported, wait for the confirmed but still undated digital distribution option to hit, or show some real resolve and wait for a North American publisher to materialize.

However you choose to procure it, go get you some handpainted Bill Tiller graphic adventure goodness, and stay tuned for the Mojo review.

For those of you who prefer to win a free copy of Ghost Pirates from a non-Sluganski source, you could always try the Adventure Gamers alternative. Looks like Mamba is making sure this game gets pimped on as many adventure game sites as they can reach, and good on 'em for it.

One thing it's not so easy to commend them for, however, is this release date confusion. While the Mamba site has and always listed the UK release date as March 26th, the date of February 19th has been thrown around as well at an increasing rate, and the sources are starting to become pretty darned legit.

Like many of you, we at Mojo have been wondering about what's going on at Autumn Moon Entertainment, who have been rather quiet recently despite putting out their second game, Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island, in Germany this past fall, with the English release coming in only a month.

So we asked.

Join us in an epic interview with CEO Bill Tiller as we discuss Ghost Pirates, A Vampyre Story, and the studio in general. You'll also find the first word on A Bat's Tale's status since the game was announced at the beginning of last year before seemingly falling off the map. Read the interview for a ship's hold worth of quality tidbits, production tales, and almost inevitable musings on the adventure game market.

Thanks are owed, of course, to the always gracious Bill Tiller and the rest of the Autumn Moon team.

Update: Because you can never get enough Ghost Pirates coverage, a brief new preview for the game has been posted by MCV, claiming a February 19th release date for the English release, although Mamba's site itself still purports March 26th. The preview also states that "Ghost Pirates will be marketed with ads and competitions in key gaming magazines and specialist adventure games websites." Evidently, they're on to something there.

Head over to Adventure Gamers if you want look at some new screenshots of the gorgeous-looking Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island, the new game from Autumn Moon Entertainment, who also made A Vampyre Story.

The game will be released in English territories on March 26th.

The Pumpkin Post noticed a blog update by Autumn Moon artist Jean-Louis Sirois (the same fella who's done all those Autumn Moon holiday images over the years) that's sure to entice you, as in it he shares some character concept art he did for Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island.

Interestingly, Sirois has yet to play the game himself because, like many of us, he's waiting on the English release. He writes that "it's looking like Voodoo Pirates will be out in the very near future in Canada/US," which is the first word we've heard of a North American release, although an English version will be available in the UK at minimum next month.

On Christmas day, while we were all spending time with our families and Ebenezer Scrooge was repenting, hosted site The Pumpkin Post reported that Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island will be published in France, having already conquered or is slated to conquer the Germanic and British territories of Europe.

According to the source for the news of the French release, the month will be February, and the publisher will be Micro Application. And the recipient will be your face.

We've already reported that Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island, a game originally written in English and first released in Germany, will be "localized" to its native tongue by UK studio Mamba Games. As noted by the guy who noted it to The Pumpkin Post, a new product page posted by Mamba lists the game's minimum requirements as well as a release date, that date being March 26th. Do I spy a new screenshot?

The next step is presumably the announcement of a North American distributor, which hopefully won't lag too far behind. My fellow Americans can rest reasonably assured though that the English release will be getting a digital distribution release, and therefore any wait to play this game after the blokes in the UK do will be purely optional.

Dtp entertainment has released a new teaser for Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island.

This is I believe the first available sample of the English voice work, and judging from the above trailer, which tells us little else, this area was well done.

Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island is currently available in Germany, and will expand to other territories with full English voices in early 2010. Between this and Tales, 'tis a fine time to be a fan of swashbucklin' graphic adventures, and in both cases brought to you by LEC veterans.

Update by Zaarin: You may be interested in this here totally unrelated, but awesome, tribute to Monkey Island by Miquel Montllo.

Autumn Moon's Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island will have its English release published by UK-based Mamba Games. The company's latest press release cites Ghost Pirates as a member of their 2010 line-up, but no date more specific than that is offered. Regardless, we can all rest assured that the English version of Bill Tiller's latest creation is on its way.

Still, like me, eagerly awaiting the English version of Ghost Pirates? Why not kill some time by heading over to the AME Blog and read Bill Tiller weighing in on his company's second release:

I was looking at my new iPhone today, a birthday present from my family, and I saw an email about Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island coming out in Germany today. I am so happy it finally made the shelves. If someone over in Germany could take a picture of it on the shelves I would appreciate it. I want to congratulate my awesome team for all the hard work they put into it.

I also heard there was a new trailer, but that some people didn't like the FMV animation. To meet our deadline I decided that we should focus on the programming and in game animation, and if we had to make cuts we would do it in the FMVs (full motion videos). The FMVs only make up 15 minutes of a ten hour game. I was talking with Ron Gilbert one day and he said “cut scenes are the least important part of an adventure game," and that I should "keep them to a minimum and focus on the game. Players are just going to skip them anyway.” Coming from a background in traditional character animation I was a bit bummed to hear that, but I reluctantly agreed that what he said made sense, so that is what we did. Not to say all the in game animations are perfect but we definitely put more time and effort on those.

Also we learned a lot from making our first game, A Vampyre Story. We improved the in game dialog, voice acting, the puzzles, the programming and scripting. Although not perfect, Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island is, in my opinion, a much more ambitious and improved product over our first one. I hope you agree.

Kinda lame that he is as in the dark as we are about the game's release and availability details. Hopefully hard news on the English version comes soon, and hopefully we start hearing about A Vampyre Story 2: A Bat's Tale again now that Ghost Pirates is (partially) out the door.

Autumn Moon Entertainment have today released their second game, Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island. In Germany, I mean. The game had Curse of Monkey Island background artist and A Vampyre Story creator Bill Tiller at the helm, and was developed by his company Autumn Moon Entertainment. It follows a trio of ghosts trying to regain their human form. You can buy it from here for €37, or a little cheaper from Amazon.de. Don't know cheaper for how long, though. If a game doesn't sell or is old enough the price goes up, so keep that in mind.

Unfortunately, the game has been released with neither English voices nor subtitles. But there's a new trailer on the website, as well as the complete soundtrack available for download seven tracks available for streaming.

An announcement on an English version is forthcoming. In the meantime, comments from anyone who bought the game are appreciated.

jp update: The german version is confirmed to have english subtitles... but it looks like you need to do a little poking around with the game files to enable them.

Previously existing only as a splash page, the official web site for Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island now has actual links that lead to destinations. After selecting the flag on the top right of the page to get to the English version, you can poke around yourself, but know that the site features eight screenshots (half of which are new), the general overviews, and a link to the game's forum.

The site suggests that the German version of the game is due out in November (can it really be that soon?) while a date for the English release is still being determined. I suppose anything's possible considering that Bill was tweeting about the game entering the bug fixing phase back in August. Stay tuned!

Autumn Moon's Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island has had its first trailer made available, which you can see at the ever-dependable Pumpkin Post. The trailer isn't that impressively cut together and you won't really learn anything, but the game's visuals remain awesome-looking.

Go watch!

Autumn Moon's upcoming second adventure game, Ghost Pirates of Monkey Vooju Island, is still a bit on the "subtle" side when it comes to marketing, but there is a new preview of the game by NowGamer with some choice words from Bill Tiller included. On the game's inception:

As much as it may look like a copycat release, however, Ghost Pirates Of Vooju Island is anything but. Written by Bill Tiller, the artist behind The Curse Of Monkey Island, Ghost Pirates is an adventure that actually started off as an idea for a proper Guybrush adventure all the way back in 1999. “Larry Ahern was relating to me how Tim Schafer wanted to do more adventure games but was annoyed how long they took,” explains Tiller. “The idea surfaced that maybe instead of one project leader doing one big adventure game you could have three project leaders doing one small adventure each. One project leader could do an adventure from Le Chuck’s perspective, another from Elaine's and again another one from Guybrush’s. It was a cool idea that never got off the ground, but the idea stuck in my head. After I left LucasArts, I still wanted to do a Monkey Island game but Jim Ward said Lucas would never do one again. So I started formulating my own game idea that didn't involve the Monkey Island licence.”

More, including the game's considered life as an episodic game, can be found in the full article. There's no word on the game's release, which was last slated for the first half of 2010. That puts it ahead of A Vamyre Story 2: A Bat's Tale, which as far as we know is still without a publisher and who knows what kind of development status.