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This domain took its name from the codewheel included with which game? (Hint: EmEye#)

Double Fine published their appropriately loving tribute to their sophomore release last week, so why shouldn’t Mojo get in on the action on this most prestigious anniversary?

For us, the fun was revisiting what it was like to follow the game’s development all those years back, and it was quite the odyssey. In fact, we think it all played out a bit spicier than you may have mellowed it down to in your headcanon, though we should probably speak for ourselves given our well-established signs of mental deterioration. Anyway, join us as we travel back to the Age of Metal and relive the ecstasy and pain of Brütal Legend’s storied forging. Embrace your inner Doviculus, and you may recognize there is no distinction.

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As they do (mostly) every October, Skunkape has invited fans to submit Sam & Max fan art for the chance to win Big Prizes, which this year includes plushies and soundtrack keys for The Devil’s Playhouse (which I take as a hopeful sign that the soundtrack will in fact exist). You’ve still got a week to enter, so review the details and do us proud. We’ll only feel entitled to the usual 40% of your winnings.

If you think that’s the extent of Sam & Max Halloween news, then you must be one of those poor dears who didn’t even know that Steve Purcell auctioned off some new Sam & Max art as part of the Hero Initiative. Even if you hold the embarrassing position of not being the winning bidder who plunked down $5,500 to own the physical art, you can still enjoy it in cyberspace:

By the way, if you weren’t around for the piece Purcell contributed to the annual benefit last year, it was no slouch itself:

There’s no reason to ostracize Double Fine from the Halloween fun. Their claim on the occasion would be their trick ‘r treat RPG masterwork, Costume Quest, which is celebrating its fourteenth birthday. I think you know what to do.

All things considered, I’d say the only thing holding back October 2024 from perfection is that there sadly seem to have been no new developments on the A Vampyre Story front. But you’ll certainly want to find the time to play the still-unsequeled 2008 graphic adventure, what with its recent re-introduction to Steam in more stable form.

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A Little Something A Schtick to the Past Ron’s as yet untitled RPG has been a fun project to track on his Mastodon account, where he regularly offers tantalizing glimpses or charming anecdotes about a stubborn bug he's looking to squash.

It’s always come across as a project he is largely flying solo on his own nickel, but perhaps A Little Something more will be required to get it to the finish line, as earlier in the month he ran this little poll:

Hey, he’s just putting feelers out. Still, now’s as good a time as any to look into renegotiating the terms of your mortgage.

Source: Ron's Mastodon

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Wake up on the Bright Side of the Moon with these fluffy critters adorning your tootsies.

Again, in collaboration with Steve Purcell, the Uncute crew behind such fluffy friends such as "Max" the stuffed animal and more recently "Sam" the stuffed animal, have done the impossible. Two Max's, which we haven't seen the likes of together since Season 2: Ep 4 "Chariots of the Dogs". The pre-order price is $35 dollars and should arrive in time for your family tradition of replaying Season 2: Ep 1 "Ice Station Santa".

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Designed in collaboration with Steve Purcell for a limited run, they’ll be ready to ship just in time for the holidays.

You either die a gumshoe detective or it's a slippery slope to become the villain.

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Source: Uncute

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It feels like only yesterday that Brütal Legend released—Rocktober 13th, if you remember.

The face-melting solo, guitar-axe-wielding open world action game (with a surprise RTS mode in the middle) featured Eddie Riggs (played by Jack Black), a roadie whose yearning for authenticity in metal music ("Like, the 70s?" "No, earlier. Like, the early 70s") has him gleefully murdering metal music-inspired demons in a metal music-inspired fantasy world when he's transported to it.

As you do.

It was a game Mojo enjoyed, more or less.

Double Fine has a little write-up on the game's legacy fifteen years on. I look back on the game fondly, personally, so this was a fun read.

Source: Double Fine Action News

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I’m not sure why you’d look for the latest Indiana Jones and the Great Circle news here on the front page when the forum coverage by “Threepwood4life” is far more dependable, but perhaps the time has come to play catch-up, if only to keep up appearances and maintain our eligibility for government subsidies.

The last non-LEGO Indy title back in 2009 was, shall we say, a furtive affair, and I think we’re starting to bear witness to what unrelieved repression ultimately leads to. Wanting to project a show of force in marketing gimmick game, Microsoft is offering up an exclusive, Indy-themed Xbox Series X console to the lucky few who want that thing in their home. What you do is haul yourself over to one of three metropolitan hubs (London, Sydney, and New York) starting November 12th. At these “Microsoft Experience Centers” you will find an Indy display that will challenge your ego with some sort of puzzle. Use your background in adventure games to solve it, and you’ve done and gone and entered for your chance to win. It’s all terribly cute. Full details of the sweepstakes are here, and below is a look at the hardware you’ll be publicly debasing yourself for:

Not exhibitionist enough for you? Then try on for size the four-wheeled promotional consideration the game will be enjoying at the Circuit of the Americas racetrack in Austin this weekend:

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Somewhere in all of this you might have maintained some curiosity about the game itself. As we are drawing closer to release, more hands-on impressions are fixing to emerge. Fans are already photo-journaling extravagant Great Circle events that Bethesda is putting on, and word is that we can expect previews to turn up before the month’s out.

Indiana Jones and the Middling Parallelogram releases December 9, 2024 on the Xbox Series S|X and on PC, with a Playstation 5 version to follow in 2025.
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I mean, not Cover-up image in the classic sense, but rather that we’ve added another section to MojoDB Preview Edition: Cover Art. Frankly, LucasArts Posters is where you want to go for high-quality scans, but then, do you really want to forego browsing classic artworks like this?

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That’s the kind of bespoke content you can only find at MojoDB, your friend in LucasArts+ covers.

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On Crooked Islands and Small Big Whoops

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We keep adding to the living article, where we look at Monkey Island 2 and what could have been. This time with some factoids you may or may not be familiar with, from “The Mysterious Island of Cleptomaniac Parrots” to Big Whoop being not much of a big whoop at all. And some other stuff, too. Have a read:

27 Sep, 2024 in M
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Remi must have missed this interview with Dan Connors and Jonathon Sgro of Skunkape Games last week, and it’s too bad, because it’s quite good. Most of the discussion focuses on what went into the development of the Sam & Max remasters, including throwing Jake under the bus at one point. But if I know you, you probably want to know what they said about The Future™:

Time Extension: With the Sam & Max games done, it would be interesting to hear what's next for the studio — what have the conversations been like internally regarding Skunkape's future? Do you anticipate working on more remasters like this or do you envision yourselves making something else entirely?

Connors: Well, we've developed something that's really powerful, which is the ability to remaster games in the Telltale engine, and there's a lot of stuff there, but they all have tricky situations around them because it's not like four years ago.

Now there's different ownership around a whole bunch of it, so we're trying to develop the right relationships there, because that's super interesting to us, and we're the right people to do it. I think the Sam & Max stuff has shown that. You know, aside from that, that's something we've got to figure out because everybody's too talented to not be working on something cool. So we just gotta figure out what it is.

Time Extension: A big thing that I've seen people say online in terms of Skunkape's future is, 'I hope they do this for Tales of Monkey Island' or 'I hope they do this for another Telltale game'. We definitely think Tales, in particular, is a game that definitely could benefit from this kind of treatment, with new lighting and things like that. It would look amazing. And I guess Disney has kind of shown some interest in doing stuff with Monkey Island again: reuniting with Ron and letting him kind of do his thing with Return to Monkey Island, but then also like doing the Sea of Thieves' crossover as well.

Connors: Yeah like we would love that. That would be amazing.

Time Extension: Yeah, I think it would definitely help introduce those games to a new audience and get the message out, 'Hey, you know these Telltale Monkey Island games are fun to play'. What do you think?

Connors: Yeah, there are things in Tales that I think we might have rushed or concepts that we thought were gonna work, that we got to a certain point, and then kind of failed before we had fully executed them. And even on Sam and Max, there were a couple of those, and when we do this process, we can say, 'Those two or three last things that we wanted to do to make this sing, we can do now.' And I think that's one of the subtle things that makes these remasters so great.

Sgro: Yeah. I love working on these things because back at Telltale — like I worked at every game on Telltale — there were always things that we couldn't have done because of the technology or the budget or time or all of that stuff combined.

You look at the final result and it's like, 'Yeah, it's great, it could be better.' So now it's just been fun taking the Sam & Max games and trying to make them the best that they could possibly be and improve all those things that we didn't have a chance to do originally. So, personally, I'd love to do that to any Telltale product pretty much. But it's limited on what we could do.

Connors: If we had a time machine, we would go back to when we got Sam & Max and try to do more but you know it is what it is.

Well, that all sounds rather definitively…ambiguous. Check out the whole thing, and buy The Devil’s Playhouse eight more times.

Source: Time Extension

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A Trip to the Library

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Did you know that the Monkey Island 2 demo included a bunch of books in the Phatt Library that were censored from the final game? Well, even if you did or you didn't, we have added a list of them to our demo examination article, because that's just how nice we treat ya.

21 Sep, 2024 in M
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Craig Circles in on Indy

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Frankly, I’m posting this just to beat Jason to the Indy punch. If The Great Circle is something you’re looking forward to, then you can do worse than reading this interview with the Craig Derrick.

17 Sep, 2024 in M
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Make Today a Demo Soundtrack Friday

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The ceo has us working hard on some LeChuck’s Revenge content these days, which is as good of excuse as any to post the “hidden” tracks from the game’s demo. Feel free to check out our demo article, too.

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06 Sep, 2024 in M
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Seeing as your life quite properly consists of watching long-form video interviews with occasional interruptions to touch grass in the form of Amiga Monkey Island playthroughs you’ll be only too happy to learn that Steve Purcell was the latest guest on Pencil to Pencil, a web series in which comic artists interview comic artists.

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Purcell can trace a decent line and all, but personally I’m awaiting an interview with the visionary behind MojoComics himself, Gabez. Maybe they don’t want to frontload the obvious guests.

Special thanks to Jake for taking time out of not inviting us to Skunkape events to give us a heads up on this one.
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For PC and Xbox, that is. Despite speculation that this could be a Microsoft exclusive, a Playstation version is promised for Spring 2025. Celebrate the release date announcement with this new trailer:

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Source: Bethesda Softworks

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And The Devil’s Playhouse keeps on rolling, this time with some updates to Benzo’s Quick & Easy software. Specifically, Telltale Explorer, Music Extractor and Speech Extractor.

Putting on his patented Mojo Cynic hat, the post caps off with, “This is a slightly bittersweet update as Devil’s Playhouse will probably be the last game ever released using the old Telltale engine.” I mean, OK, that is probably true, but one can always hope that more is on the horizon.

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McConnell Whoops It Up

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Another day, another Albu chat, this time with Peter McConnell which, let’s be honest, can’t be a bad thing. And at two hours, it’s not a wild investment of time either. Check it out…

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19 Aug, 2024 in M
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… we have the choice to cry into the pillow over getting old or celebrate a stellar game. And, since we finished the former, you can now reap the benefits from the latter: Enjoy yourself with these newly unearthed 2009 SCUMM Bar reviews of Tales of Monkey Island.

OK, so not the grandest of gestures, but we probably will do more, maybe. Because the game truly deserves it. Check out the Mojo review, too.

Fifteen years, seriously…

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Last month saw another welcome entry in the “Lucasfilm Games Rewind” series over in the blog section of Lucasfilm.com, this one being a tribute to Loom.

It’s indeed a nice little writeup on the 1990 classic, but the irony of its devout tone might be a bit too rich for some to digest, considering that Lucasfilm only offers the VGA version of the game - drastically re-written compared to the EGA original, the artwork for which is a high water mark of the 16 color era - through Steam and GOG. It also happens to be a version of the game loathed by creator Brian Moriarty, who is solicitously quoted throughout the piece.

But some things in life just must be accepted, and we should all humble ourselves to the reality that this issue is literally impossible to address.

Source: Lucasfilm.com

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Release day has come and gone, and whether you binged your way through Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse: Remastered or you’re making a point of savoring it (or you’re merely employed), the game is pretty much the only purpose your life serves at the moment. And rightly so.

While Remi’s review is really the only one you need to consider, I guess we should point out that critics everywhere are taking the necessary steps to not make fools of themselves by aggressively loving the game. Meanwhile, Skunkape has published its traditional Steam post that goes deep into exactly what they changed in their fastidious remastering efforts. Some of it May Surprise You. Cover-up image

Additionally, they assure that the usual sack of archival content, along with the soundtrack release you’ve all been awaiting since, oh, let’s say 2010, is forthcoming. Where the former is concerned, followers of Skunkape’s social media presence have already gotten a taste, and quite the nourishing one at that for proper connoisseurs of vintage web announcement ephemera:

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Speaking of social media, I was happy to see that Chuck Jordan, whose last big contribution (his greatest to adventure games, if I might suggest?) at Telltale was The Devil's Playhouse, registered his thoughts for the occasion:

The three-years-in-the-making revamp of Telltale’s masterpiece is what is termed in esoteric Mixnmojo parlance A Big Deal, and we can naturally be expected to keep squeezing juice out of it for weeks years an appropriate and judicious length of time to come. So get ready to relish every second of it.

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Scabb Island Beach by Day

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Ever wondered what the Scabb Island beach would look like during daytime? Wonder no more: The (questionably named) Booty Boutique has you covered with this serene video and original music.

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15 Aug, 2024 in M
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