The International House of Mojo

THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH

I only have one request of Tim Schafer for the new year: make more games. He should have it as his new years resolution. Psychonauts was lovely, but I now feeling like Oliver, holding up his bowl and saying, “please sir, can I have some more?”

The problem is, I don’t want Double Fine to rush their games; I mean, making great stuff takes time, and I don’t think Psychonauts could really have been done any faster. So what’s the solution? Simple: episodes!

Instead of releasing a new game every three to four years, I propose that we get something every day, or, at the very least, every month. It doesn’t even have to be something I can play. It could be a picture, or a sound file of Tim snoring. Or just a pixel.

Whatever it is, this new episodic content will allow me to attach myself to a constant cyber-feed, sucking on new content like a hamster on a water drip, until I finally become so utterly addicted that if the episodes were to stop, I’d shrivel up and die from the shock of change.

LONGER PLEASURE, PLEASE

And what would I ask of Telltale? The opposite, of course: stop making episodic games; or at least, keep Sam & Max and Bone churning, but have a team left over, working on one big adventure game product, based on completely original ideas, that will ferment and grown in your offices, to be unleashed in stores in three years time.

I love what Telltale have done with the episodic format, I really do... but a part of me wants to see what they’d do if they had more freedom, in their own controlled licence, over a greater amount of game play time.

My three favourite adventure game sections are part two in LeChuck’s Revenge, year two in Grim Fandango, and day two in The Last Express. What makes these sections so special is that they’re each the longest and most difficult part of the game. All the setting up has been done, and the ending hasn’t started to unravel yet, so this “two” section, roughly mid-way through the game, involves puzzles that have you using objects from completely different areas, and you have to complete things in a certain order to progress. I love that.

Rubaccava and the Tri-island area were massive places, and the enormity of the puzzle was intimidating (and really, it is just one massive puzzle at this two section), but once everything was pulled together, it felt extremely satisfying, like I’d just put the last piece into a jigsaw puzzle. My point is, that this sort of thing could never be done with episodic games, and that’s what I’d like to see from Telltale.

Note to self: Mojo should talk about Dave Grossman more. He worked on Monkey Island, for turnip’s sake! And he’s the senior designer at Telltale! And he writes poetry. And makes pumpkins. We need to fit him in to every other news post, perhaps with a hilarious “Dan Pettit” style joke.

Note to people reading this: where did all the adventure game fan-sites go? Someone should make some more. This time next year we should at least have a Bone site. Please. I’m too lazy to do it myself. Any offers?

TWO’S COMPANY

This leaves us with Ron Gilbert and Autumn Moon to be dealt with in this mad list of impossible wishes that I probably don’t even mean; and they can be dealt with together, because they get a similar reaction from me. What have we seen from either of them in the last year? Bugger all. How much would we like to see their stuff? Very very much so.

Admittedly Ronzo is the worst of the two; we have had concept art and blogs from Autumn Moon; all we know about Ronzo is that he’s been to Paris. I mean great stuff, there. I loved that picture of him eating a huge wedge of brie. But can I play it? No.

Come to think of it, what exactly is Ronzo doing? I vaguely remember him saying, years ago, that he might be working on a new game, but since we haven’t even seen a company being set up, it’s possible that he simply spends his days watching MTV instead. Stay tune, though: Mojo will be sure to get the scoop on what he’s up to in January ’07. That’s a Mojo Promise™.

The kind of game I’d like Ronzo to work on would be one which made fun of the games industry, and was very self-aware of itself as a game at the same time. Something that played around with conventions; had characters interrupting the player if they saved the game too much; made jokes about pushing crates; that sort of thing.

The first two Monkey Island games started this off, with their "never pay ten bucks" cracks, the Elaine Marley role-reversal, the fake deaths, and, of course, the secret dream twist... but nobody seems to have properly picked up the trail since, which is why Ronzo should, nay, must, produce something in this line which will make us all snort milk out of our noses again.

If I’m going to be critical (and I am going to be critical, as well as annoying, and bloaty, and weird), then I would say that Bill Tiller is slightly too ambitious. I think he should make A Vampyre Story to the mould of Full Throttle, mainly because then it would be short, and so it could be released sooner.

Besides, this is the 21st century: nobody actually has time to do anything anymore, apart from watch TV for four hours every day, and we need a game that will fit snugly into the MTV advert breaks. Everything should be short and delicious, apart from of course the five hundred hour monster game that Telltale will begin work on...

I’d also love to see A Vampyre Story as a franchise. I think there’s a lot to be done with the whole gothic vampire genre (and we all know how much I love Goths!), though on top of that I’d also love to see what Tiller could do with some other settings, like, I don’t know, medieval times, or sci-fi, or fantasy. What would Middle Earth look like with curly clouds? I want to find out. I want Bill Tiller to draw the art for every game in my head, and I want Ronzo to design it, and Tim Schafer to write it, and Telltale to produce it and Bad Brain to publish it.

I want it all, and I want it now. Of course, it would be a miracle if even a fraction of the stuff mentioned above comes out in 2007, but you never know. We will, as always, just have to wait and see.

Next page: results, results, results.