The material from the second episode doesn't start until one minute in. As always journey to Youtube if the video doesn't embed properly for you below.
Source: Youtube
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GOG has announced a second wave of six LucasArts games to be made available beginning this week. Yawn your way through the following selection!
- Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance
- Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds Saga
- Star Wars: X-Wing Vs. Tie Fighter
- Star Wars: Dark Forces
- Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II
- Star Wars: Battlefront II
Because if there's one game that Earth's population has struggled to find at a decent price over the last fifteen years, it's KOTOR 2. Thank goodness our prayers have been answered.
Look, I get it. These are well regarded games, and they deserve to be re-released. But generally, you treat the guy who's in cardiac arrest before the guy whose foot fell asleep.
You ain't funny, GOG. Give us a better reason to wait next time, please. These reasons should feel free to be spelled exactly like Day of the Tentacle or Full Throttle.
Source: GOG.com
Perhaps you already knew about this, in which case quit showing off, but about two weeks ago Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick launched a development diary for Thimbleweed Park, and they've been updating it fairly regularly. Might be something to keep an eye on.
Source: Thimbleweed Park Development D
Now we know for sure this is an actual game. The screenshots and videos featured on the site seem to be things you'd have already been exposed to, but it's pretty much all worth it for the paper mache version of the Double Fine logo. Unless that's old news too.
Bit of trivia: The site's only been up for hours, which means that it's roughly on par with the sum total of Mixnmojo's uptime since 1997. Thank you! Thank you!
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Source: Grim Fandango
ScummVM has just announced support for two new games in their daily builds, Zork Nemesis and Zork: Grand Inquisitor. In order to support these games in the next stable release, they need people to help them out by playing through them and reporting any bugs they find to their bug tracker so the ScummVM team can squash them. They also need people to submit screenshots for the games.
When you're done testing, don't forget to let the team know whether you could complete the game and post links to any bugs you submitted to their tracker in this post on the ScummVM forums.
Source: Kolzig
Those who didn't back the Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter at a tier high enough to get a boxed copy have a chance to get a retail version of Broken Age (although not the same one as the one on the Kickstarter, as that one is a Kickstarter exclusive). Nordic Games will be publishing Broken Age at retail in Europe and North America shortly after Act 2 is released online.
The Kickstarter boxed collector's edition will be arriving at some point after that, since it also includes the documentary, and that can't be mastered until the final episode of the documentary is released.
In other Double Fine news, they have started a new YouTube series with 2 Player Productions called Devs Play, where Double Fine developers play through and talk about games from time gone by, and sometimes are joined by the developers of those games. They've covered Aladdin and Lion King for Genesis, Mother, Earthbound, and Mother 3, and Gauntlet for the Nintendo DS so far. They'll be playing through The Legend of Zelda, Doom, and speed running through Psychonauts with a YouTube speedrunner who has found some techniques to speed through the game by way of glitches (and the Psychonauts team will be there to talk about the glitches, which should prove interesting).
Adventure Gamers has posted an informative interview with Dave Grossman, as interviewed by former Telltale PR person Emily Morganti. Dave talks about his time at LucasArts, leaving Telltale, joining Reactive Studios as chief creative officer on their interactive audio dramas, working with Bill Tiller on Duke Grabowski: Mighty Swashbuckler, and hints at future projects.
Some of the most interesting points brought up in the interview include the fact that Brian Moriarty, the creator of Loom and project lead of the unreleased first version of The Dig is on the board at Reactive too, and the team is going to try to do a text adventure style audio drama at some point, with Dave hinting towards a Sherlock Holmes story and one based on Jekyll and Hyde. Another interesting tidbit is that Dave Grossman is going to be helping out with another game project that had a successful Kickstarter, but he can't talk about that yet. So, even though Dave is working from home now, 2015 certainly looks to be a busy year.
The SpaceVenture team finally posted an update with news about the space themed game by the Two Guys from Andromeda, the creators of Space Quest. They've hired Josh Mandel on as a writer. If you don't know who Josh Mandel is, he's honorary third guy of Andromeda, who co-directed Space Quest 6, as well as Freddy Pharkas Frontier Pharmacist, and most recently Leisure Suit Larry Reloaded and Fester Mudd: Curse of the Gold.
The bumps they have been having have been ironed out, as the main problems have been on the programming end, and that is going much more smoothly now. They are now on the final third of game development, and feel confident that the game is on track to be released some time in 2015.
While we were down, ResidualVM, the project that aims to support 3D adventure games on a wide range of modern computer platforms, received its latest stable release.
This release brings Myst III: Exile support, fixes some bugs in Grim Fandango, and adds game data verification on first launch (so that you'll know if your game data was copied correctly from your CDs). There are builds available for Windows, Linux and OS X.
In the unstable builds of ResidualVM, Escape from Monkey Island is also completable with a few glitches. The ResidualVM team is going to continue to work to get that game supported in 2015.
The testing period for ResidualVM 0.2.0 is now here. They need people to test Myst III and Grim Fandango for the latest release. If you want to help, pick up or compile the latest daily build on the platform of your choice. Play through the game, without skipping dialog, and without updating ResidualVM during your entire play through.
If you find any bugs, submit them to the ResidualVM issue tracker. Then report whether you were able to complete the game and any bugs you might have found on their forums.
It seems that Dave Grossman joining Reactive Studios brought some interesting changes to their Codename Cygnus interactive audio adventure.
The latest update for iOS and Android brings a new mission to their spy drama, Holiday Party. It's the first story designed by Dave Grossman, and it makes many changes to make the series less linear, and more interactive. According to their blog it adds multiple choices for paths through the plot, leading to three different endings.The best part is it's free to download. You just have to download the app, and you can download and jump right into this episode. You don't have to purchase the rest of the episodes to play this one. It's a nice holiday treat from Reactive Studios and Dave Grossman, and is a sample of the experimental ideas that Dave Grossman is going to be bringing to the table during his tenure at Reactive.
Turns out it's just that you're not giving the later sequels enough credit.
Every decade or so it's necessary to write an article delving into the "meaning" behind Monkey Island just to remind you of how stale the topic really is. Today comes my contribution to this tradition of over-analysis, but my "twist" is arguing that picking over the subtext of the first two games only casts the post-Ron installments in a more favorable light.
I'm just a merchant of controversy these days, aren't I?
Thanks to Remi for the header image.
More maniacs have joined the team for Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick's Thimbleweed Park.
The first is Ken Macklin, who designed the cover for Maniac Mansion. He will be doing the cover for Thimbleweed Park as well.
Secondly, is the creator of Zak McKracken, David Fox. He worked on Maniac Mansion as well, doing most of the SCUMM scripting for the game, and is apparently the one we have to thank for the hamster in the microwave joke.
So if you haven't backed yet, or want to move up a pledge tier, now's the perfect time to head over to the kickstarter and back the game.
Polygon was able to prod Tim a bit about the recently announced Day of the Tentacle remake, which is still in its earliest phases but which he promises will remain 2D. Beyond assurances of faithfulness, we'll just have to wait to learn what this upgrade will really look or sound like (while wondering what the LEC Singapore sweat shop kids came up with first).
When asked about the business side of securing the license in the first place, Tim describes a situation that really makes me hopeful for the future.
"There were just some people at Disney, Sony and Lucasfilm that care about these games," he said. "They're old enough that some of these people who are executives played them when they were kids. I've been really impressed with the fact that these kind of deals have come together because there's so many reasons for this deal not to happen. There's so many parties involved and so many people who could've said no, that it really took a passionate drive by people in the right places to escort it through the process."
Perhaps Tim's dream of revisiting all the old adventures is a bit too good to be true, but still, it's hard to imagine the future of these games ever being more bright, or for a better group of custodians to be assigned their preservation than Schafer's studio. Hopefully those fans strategically positioned at Disney stick around long enough for Double Fine to keep going through the catalog.
Source: Polygon
Hopefully it appears for you below. I understand that our faultless embedding technology doesn't serve everyone equally well, so you can alternatively make the pilgrimage to Youtube.
Oh dear, I do believe I'm getting the vapors!
During the keynote of something called the "Playstation Experience", Double Fine announced a few minor things. One is that Grim Fandango Remastered will come out on January 27th (previously known as "early 2015"). The second is that the complete Broken Age is headed to PS4 and Vita once Act II makes it to Steam.
Oh, they also threw in that they're making a special edition of Day of the Tentacle. No big deal.
While we wait for details on that, here's a new look at Grim Remastered.
Source: Shacknews
Though they unquestionably achieved all the reach they could ever hope to by talking with Mojo, Ron and Gary are doing the polite thing by promoting their absurdly successful Kickstarter for Thimbleweed Park elsewhere as well.
See what Gamasutra was able to wrangle from the duo before checking out IGN's interview for comparison. Then feel bad for both of them when you re-read our own.
The first episode of Game of Thrones, Iron From Ice, now has release dates. It will be available on December 2 on PC/Mac through the Telltale Store and Steam. On December 3, it will release for the PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One worldwide. On December 4, it will release for iOS, and then on December 9 it will release for the PlayStation 3 worldwide. It will also be coming to Android at an as of yet unannounced date in December.