The International House of Mojo

It's time again for a post that lets you know all the small tidbits of Mojo related news that are happening now.

First, ex-Mojoer (and multiple Game of the Year award winner) Jake Rodkin's new studio Campo Santo has become just that much cooler with the addition of former Double Fine lead artist Jane Y. Ng to the team. Seriously, with the roster of talent they have at the studio already, their first game is sure to be awesome.

Secondly, you might remember the Kickstarted album by Sierra veteran composer Ken Allen of orchestrated versions of his video game songs. You might be wondering about the progress of the album. Mr. Allen reiterated last month in the comments section of that Kickstarter campaign that the project is currently on hold as he works on sound design and makes new compositions for SpaceVenture, the upcoming space comedy adventure game by The Two Guys From Andromeda (the creators of Space Quest). As music was always an important piece of what made Sierra's games popular, and Ken Allen was a big part of that, it's great to see the Two Guys and Ken Allen working together on a project again.

The Walking Dead: Season Two Episode 1: All That Remains is out now for most platforms. It's available for PC and Mac through Steam and the Telltale Store, for Xbox 360's Live Arcade and PS3's PlayStation Network in Europe and North America, and on iTunes (where the title gets even larger as Walking Dead: The Game - Season Two).

Telltale's PR Person Laura Perusco posted in the PlayStation blog that news about the PlayStation Vita release will be coming shortly after the holidays. There's no word on the release date for the Ouya version (although The Walking Dead: Season One is scheduled to be released on Ouya in Winter 2014, so it won't be releasing sooner than that).

Develop has run a two part (1, 2) interview with industry and LucasArts veteran Noah Falstein. The designer discusses the old days, including how he dressed up as a fallen cosmonaut for the Rescue on Fractalus! manual, how he wishes his initial version of The Dig had gotten made, and how you owe him for the hiring of Ron Gilbert.

Falstein’s anecdotes are great, although I guess if you know your Lucasfilm history this interview largely treads old ground. Still, it’s hard to ever get enough stories of the formative years of George Lucas' wonderful, expensive experiment that resulted in not only the SCUMM games, but Pixar Animation Studios and Avid’s nonlinear editing tools as well. More importantly, Thrillville.

Source: Develop

Atlus has released a new trailer for Tex Murphy: Tesla Effect. The game is the sixth entry in the full-motion video detective adventure game series, which was partially financed by a successful Kickstarter campaign last year. The game is scheduled to release early next year for PC and Mac.

Telltale just made a post on Twitter announcing the release dates for The Walking Dead: Season Two Episode 1: All That Remains.

It will release later today for PC and Mac (through the Telltale Store and Steam) and for PlayStation 3 in North America. It will then release tomorrow worldwide for Xbox 360. The iOS version will be coming later this week. The European PlayStation 3 release date, as well as the release dates for the Vita and Ouya versions have not yet been set.

Source: Telltale Twitter

While we're on the subject of Gene Mocsy, you might remember that he started a company called Irresponsible Games, whose first game will be a point-and-click adventure game called Alcatraz: 1954, which, unsurprisingly is about escaping from Alcatraz prison in 1954. Gene originally designed the game himself using the Panda3D-based engine that MunkyFun designed for Autumn Moon's adventure games A Vampyre Story and Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island. However, the game soon was picked up by the German adventure developer Daedalic, and it was converted to their Unity-based engine.

GamingLives has an interview with Mr. Mocsy which details that event, and gives many more details about his company's first game. One of the most interesting details in the interview is about the wide choice the player has in solving the puzzles, and the consequences some of those choices might have:

"Multiple solutions are something I always want when I play games – that and an overhead map. I made sure those were in my game. It was a bit of a hassle, but I scripted the original game myself, so it was just a matter of my time. When Daedalic bought the game and re-ported it to their engine, they created an enormous flowchart of all the possibilities – that was when I realised the headache I’d caused everyone! It’s all for the player. I want you to keep moving ahead and not waste time guessing what the designer intended."

"Certain quest-lines get even more exciting and tension-filled [depending on your earlier actions], I’ll put it that way. Don’t worry about making wrong choices – you’re escaping from Alcatraz, there’s no time to second-guess yourself. Just go."

The game will be coming soon to PC. Daedalic had announced that it would be released this year, however, as no concrete release date has yet been set, it probably won't make that release window.

Source: GamingLives

You may be wondering what is going on with the upcoming free iOS adventure game Perils of Man, which is being developed by IF Games and designed by Bill Tiller and Gene Mocsy of Autumn Moon.

Its previous release date of October 2013 came and went, and the official Facebook page has been surprisingly quiet about the situation.

Surprising no one, the game's FAQ has recently been updated, indicating that the game has been delayed to early 2014. However, there's no word on whether they still plan on releasing the game in two episodes as originally planned.

Source: Perils of Man FAQ

Leisure Suit Larry creator Al Lowe and co-writer Josh Mandel have left Replay Games due to the abusive and destructive behavior of Replay founder and CEO Paul Trowe.

As you know, last year he sabotaged fellow Kickstarter campaigns with false press releases and hurtful and deceitful comments (both under his own name and possibly under an assumed name).

Unfortunately, that behavior hasn't stopped, as he posted some hurtful words and unfounded claims at the SpaceVenture Kickstarter page in October. That behavior caused several Replay volunteers to criticize Paul's behavior publicly, leading Paul to fire them and ban them from the Replay forums. Worse, he insulted and publicly outed one volunteer as a transsexual woman (her name has been omitted from the twitter post to save her from any more emotional duress).

Additionally, Kotaku has posted an article that details Paul Trowe's arrest in October 2012 for showing a sex video to an underage teenage girl.

Al Lowe has stated that his leaving the company had to do with these and other reasons. Replay Games still owns the rights to make Leisure Suit Larry games for now, but if they do decide to make more, it will be without Al Lowe or Josh Mandel.

We at Mojo wish Al and Josh (as well as the Replay volunteers and employees who were affected by this) the best of luck in the future.

Source: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Tim Schafer revealed last night at VGZ that Elijah Wood will voice the male protagonist Shay in Broken Age. Shay is the boy from the trailers who have lived his entire life on a space life where he's been taken care of by an AI.

Source: Kotaku

According to the game's Steam page, the release date is 17th of December for the first episode. Are they full of shit? Guess we'll find out in 1 week, 3 days, and 22 hours.

Source: Steam

So let's address the elephant in the room here: Yes, Mojo is reviewing Broken Sword 5. No, Revolution is not part of the greater LEC-family of companies. Yes, this is part of an expansion of Mojo. No, we're not turning into a general adventure site.

What we are doing is broadening our focus just a tiny little bit. To put our mission-statement-of-sorts in the words of our idea smith, Thrik: “Mojo: Classic LucasArts adventure games, and games that are similar to them.” We'll be covering everything we've always covered, while adding a handful of other games that make sense within Mojo's spiritual scope. Broken Sword for example. Dyscourse, where Tim Schafer is a character. That kinds of stuff. Derivative adventure games that try to ape the success of LucasArts in the 1990s without understanding what they were actually about? We will not cover those.

So basically we're turning into Just Mixnmojo+-ish and we're feeling good about that. Hopefully you will too.

And what better way to kick this off than by reviewing Broken Sword 5? Remember: Mojo still loves you!

Well, the first episode at least. While Double Fine has been fiddling away on Broken Age, Revolution has run a successful Kickstarter, developed the game they promised to make, and released it. The second, and final, episode will be out in a month or so.

Broken Sword 5 returns to the same aesthetic as the first two games in the series, looking more like a LucasArts adventure than whatever else we've been covering the past decade. Here's a screenshot:

And some plot info courtesy of the press release:

Both episodes can be picked up from the usual outlets like GOG and Steam. Vita and mobile platforms will also follow, according to Revolution.

Source: Revolution.co.uk

Paul Shapera, the composer of the upcoming free two part adventure game for iOS designed by Autumn Moon's founder Bill Tiller and Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island co-writer Gene Mocsy, has made an interesting blog post detailing the sound design process of Perils of Man.

"I’ve amassed a plethora of sound effects, and insuring they will be clear over the music, PLUS dialogue has been interesting. An interesting challenge is the fact that you may have certain fx looping in the background in addition to the music, voice stuff and individual fx. For instance, if the protagonist is in a room, when standing next to a window or a furnace an effect will play the entire time she is in range, and with that is the music, her interacting with objects, opening and shuffling through her inventory, making exclamations, etc. Fascinating to work on."

The really good news is that, according to the blog post, the first part should be releasing very soon (assuming IF Games still is going forward with its plans to release the game in two parts). It certainly sounds like an interesting concept. Hopefully it lives up to its potential.

Telltale announced today that The Walking Dead: Season Two will premiere later this year. It is available for preorder for PC and MAC from the official site. The press release reveals a bit about what we can expect:

There's also a trailer:

A Game of the Year Edition of the first season will also be released next month for PC, Xbox 360, and PS3. It will include the 400 Days DLC as well as the soundtrack and a behind the scenes video.

Source: The Telltale Blog

Have you ever found yourself wondering, "Say, what if someone re-interpreted Stanley Kubrick's The Shining as a machinima primarily assembled using art assets from the NES version of Maniac Mansion?"

Well, the winsomely disturbed artisans of the "CineFix" Youtube channel are here to put this issue to bed, though good luck getting any decent shut-eye yourself after a viewing of what they've wrought.

Source: CineFix

One of the theoretical benefits of games developed for the digital space is that they're not subject to a literal shelf life - with packaging and distribution costs right around zero, they can be readily available for as long as the publisher sees fit.

Does Telltale see otherwise in the direction of its earliest releases? It has been noticed that while they remain available on Steam, Telltale Texas Hold'em and the Bone games have been recently removed from Telltale's online catalog. This feels significant to me.

Telltale Texas Hold'em was built in 2004-2005 primarily to test the brand-spanking new Telltale Tool, particularly the character performance aspect that would of course be crucial to their story games. Sufficiently amused by the results, the tiny company decide it to sell it as their highly unexpected first product partially as a lark. While the game's premise feels like a promise that would only be truly delivered on with the Poker Night at the Inventory games, it remains an important part of the now widely known studio's history and if nothing else is a necessary antecedent for at least one Sam & Max in-joke.

The two Bone games, of course, are Telltale's promising first offerings of the sort of games they are actually known for, and it's kind of amazing to look back on how accurately they foretold the vision and philosophies that the company continues to follow to this day - play them again if you don't believe me. It still kind of pisses me off that it remains Telltale's only unfinished series, as it predated their seasonal approach, and it's surely too late to revive it, but they are good games, and The Great Cow Race arguably competes with Tales from Monkey Island as the closest to an old-school graphic adventure design the company, which has never fed the misconception that they were specifically out to make classic adventure games, ever treaded. And it will be impossible for me not to compare the soundtrack of the eventual movies to Jared Emerson-Johnson's brilliant take on Jeff Smith's world. (I suppose the once freely available tracks would have gone down with the product page.)

So what gives? Is this a temporary absence? Were there rights issues involved (only plausible with Bone)? Because otherwise, the only way to interpret this is as some kind of statement, and sort of a sad one.

Update (14th of October): The Mac version is available now to download, both from Steam and the Telltale Games store.

Game Informer is reporting that the Mac version of The Wolf Among Us Episode 1: Faith has been delayed due to an unforseen issue in the release build.

Telltale's public relations person Laura Perusco has stated that the development team is working on a fix, and the Mac version should be available in the next few days.

Source: Game Informer

Update (October 8, 2013) - It's official. Telltale has confirmed that the first episode of The Wolf Among Us will release for PC, Mac, and Xbox Live Arcade on October 11, 2013. North American and European release dates for PlayStation Network will be released within the next few days.

The Wolf Among Us Episode 1 product page on Xbox Live Arcade lists a release date of October 11.

The Xbox Live Arcade Marketplace has been shown to be a source of accidentally released, yet reliable, information in the past since the information is supplied straight from the publisher (Poker Night 2 was confirmed to be in development through XBLA).

So, chances are very high that the first episode of The Wolf Among Us will indeed be coming for Xbox Live Arcade this Friday (and to other platforms within a week of that, if the release dates of The Walking Dead are anything to go by).

Update: Green Man Gaming listed the PC version with a release date of the 11th of October as well.

Also, IGN's Up At Noon has an interview regarding The Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead Season Two, including footage of The Wolf Among Us in action.

Also, while on the subject of The Walking Dead Season Two, Telltale's PR person Laura Perusco confirmed that some time after the premiere of the first episode, Telltale is going to go ahead with their plan to have multiple seasons run concurrently by having The Walking Dead Season Two premiere while The Wolf Among Us season is still running.

Source: XBLA Marketplace

The Wolf Among Us, Telltale's five part episodic series based on Bill Willingham's Fables, is now available to pre-order on Steam and at Telltale's revamped online store.

Adding to the good news is that the collector's discs have returned. If you pre-order it from Telltale's site you will be eligible to receive a DVD containing the entire season plus some extras after the season has completed, for just the cost of shipping.