Mike Stemmle's Linkedin profile isn't just a resume, but a platform for expressing latent regret. Have a look at the LucasArts section and you'll see what I mean:
There, you see? He apologized. And that's more than you can say for whichever monster is responsible for that assemble-the-turtle-skeleton puzzle in The Dig. These people need to be held accountable.
I got some used revenge porn to sell you!
I was a bit puzzled by Sam and Max-related comments about Max being a "gay icon," but then YouTube threw this at me and I've been quietly traumatised by the idea of either Sam or Max getting down to business since.
I'd always interpreted these as Max being indifferent towards anyone he wasn't pummelling or, in a universe that's rarely floated sexuality, asexual, but hey, when you put it like that: good for Max. And a point against my literary analysis skills. But I'll be looking for bunny ears at the next pride march.
Source: YouTube
I remember a time when Mixnmojo was spammed every day by overzealous fans wanting—nay, demanding and petitioning—Telltale Games to recast Sam and Max with "Hit the Road" actors Bill Farmer and Nick Jameson. With at least one fan still obsessing about this and refusing to let 1993 go, and my suspecting that nostalgia is a more potent, opinion-altering drug than most prepackaged powder you'll score on a corner, I went to find a Sam and Max voice comparison video on YouTube and pulled the highest rated comment: "tinkler was a great voice for max bc he perfectly conveyed his personality in his dialogue, but kasten/boat was also great during the rest of telltale's series. for sam, i cant see anyone else besides nowlin playing him after the telltale games, he really hit the nail on the head with his emphasis and emotion when it was needed, especially during season 3."
Ah, how the tables turn. Or how strong a thing nostalgia is. It's almost as if the Internet loves to whine for nothing. But does this illustration of the concept of "opinions" mean the Internet will move on? Of course not! But since pettiness is the order of the day, I'll point out that the real point of this post is that being proven right really is the most potent drug of all.
Source: YouTube
If, like me, you find endless franchising exhausting, or the need for the movie-going, TV-loving public to remain forever in its collective childhood unnerving, allow me to present Disney's sequel-, spin-off-, reboot-infested vision of hell.
Source: Deadline
Look: I'm not saying that Mixnmojo, small website though it may be, is in any way important to the universe at large...
I am, however, saying that the world went a bit topsy-turvy around the time Mixnmojo stopped marking Talk Like a Pirate Day, and I'll be damned if in this logic-free dimension of reality correlation doesn't imply causation. With that in mind, I'll now attempt to save the world by pulling a quote, at random, from a beloved mighty pirate. Ahem:
I once had a barber named Dominique.
Harrrrr!
In the wake of Jason's recent, controversial comments which served to demean the upcoming re-release of the beloved N64 classic Star Wars Episode 1: Racer, we have decided that he does not reflect Mixnmojo's values and have invited him to pursue new career opportunities, effective immediately.
We did not come to this decision lightly, and imagine there may be some who consider that Jason's remarks, however insensitive, are not grounds for dismissal. We would agree, were it a first offense. But in fact it is a continuation of a pattern of behavior Jason has exhibited for over a decade.
Consider this news post from January 2007, shortly after it was announced that Traxion, a rhythm-based PSP game being developed by Kuju Entertainment, had been cancelled by LucasArts. The game's demise had already been reported on, and more than enough derision had already been directed at it. Enough was enough. But Jason just couldn't help but make one more snide remark at Traxion's expense, spurring Jake to speak truth to power in the comments:
"Everyone's being so hard on Traxion :( I have no idea what that game was, or if it was good at all, or anything, but Kuju - the developer of Traxion - is a cool studio and they don't deserve to be abused. Go play Batallion Wars on the Gamecube and then come back and dump on them again. It will be a lot harder to do."
We quite agree, Jake. And while Mojo prides itself in allowing its staffers to voice their opinions without fear of reprisal, we must balance this ideal of editorial freedom with the responsibility that comes with the influential Alexa ranking of 2,529,964. In short, we can only offer wayward employees so many chances to change.
We wish Jason only the best in his future endeavors and hope to continue to provide a safe environment for an audience that has come to expect unwavering loyalty to a pod racing game. Please continue to hold us to account and help us honor our pledge to do better.
God bless,
The Mojo Management
Remember when I accidentally made a typo that stated that "Double Fine Remastered" was coming instead of "Full Throttle Remastered"?
I just remembered that Double Fine Special Edition does exist. It was released exclusively at PAX East 2016. I guess my typo was prescient after all.
I love Tim Schafer, but every so often I remember that one time he spoiled the ending to Murder on the Orient Express for us—me, you, all of us—because deep beneath that teddy bear-like demeanour lies the heart of a monster. A monster whose heart Tim probably ate after stabbing through the chest. I've nursed the wound of this betrayal since August 15th, 2006. Sometimes I think it's healed.
Yep, they've done it. Valve has just announced that they've stopped work on In the Valley of Gods, saying "After careful evaluation of current market place realities and underlying economic considerations, we've decided that this was not the appropriate time to launch a first-person adventure."
Don't believe that its possible? Here's the official announcement from Polygon. Our best wishes go out to everyone on the In the Valley of Gods team, who are apprently all still going to be kept on at Valve.
To us, the decision seems completely absurd, and not just because "we love adventure games," or something. Surely In the Valley of Gods's production was plagued with troubles, but from the sounds of it so is every game project. Everything that came out about In the Valley of Gods seemed golden. The press was drooling over the game. It looked like they had a follow-up going on that, unlike some other recent follow-ups, was actually going ot get it right. But now, out of the blue, its gone. Which really really makes all of us wonder...
an editorial by the staff of Mixnmojo
Valve has made a gigantic mistake.
There, we've said it. Everyone else is already thinking it, and other people have probably already said it, but now we've said it too. The official Mixnmojo stance on In the Valley of Gods being cancelled is that Valve has seriously screwed up, just about as much as possible.
Production has stopped on the last original game --and the only game really-- anyone around here was genuinely interested in seeing. Cancelled. Why? From the sounds of it, the people in the Sales department spent the last three months winding themselves up about how impossible it would be for them to sell a quirky adventure game, eventually just snapped, and cancelled the title. Is that screwed up? Yes, that is screwed up.
Valve has made a lot of really bad moves in the last year. The Lab was allowed to ship. It tanked hard. Who really thought The Lab would be marketable, would sell well, would really catch the attention of gamers? Prospero , despite a constant stream of negative to lukewarm receptions from magazines and fans, was allowed to live on in production far longer than anyone really wanted.
Artifact, one of the few truly original gems Valve has dealt with in the last five or six years, was rushed out early by the suits, in hopes of grabbing some Christmas shoppers. This was decided despite Christmas being notorious for huge A-list titles like Lord of the Rings hogging the coverage and hype, and for mothers who know nothing about games being the ones doing the shopping. Not surprisingly, Artifact had a poor holiday season. Who knows what might have happened if they'd let Richard Garfield refine the game for a few months, and released Artifact it in the nearly empty February, after everyone had exhausted their Christmas games and was looking for something new?
Recently, they shipped Left 4 Dead: Survivors. For more on Left 4 Dead, see The Lab a few paragraphs up. And finally, today we receive word that In the Valley of Gods has been axed.
Notice a trend here? Correct. Not one of the recent Valve bungles mentioned above contained the two magic words, Half-Life. If you give the suits at Valve a Half-Life game, they can sell it. Why? Because they don't have to try! No cleverness is needed. That's not to say it doesn't take any work, but for the most part you just need to get the screenshots out, buy a few ads on Gamespot, and tell the press "yep, it's basically like EA's The Two Towers game, but this time you play as characters from -- wait for it -- Half-Life!" WHOP, you've made the cover of EGM. (Of course it helps, but isn't essential, if the Half-Life game you're selling is actually good, like Half-Life 2: Episode Two)
Valve has more or less proven that they can sell the hell out of anything that says Half-Life on the box (again, because that takes no creativity and instead a few magic words, some money, and maybe a wave or two of the nostalgia wand, or possibly the soccer mom wand depending if it's a classic or prequel title), but more importantly they've proven that if they are handed anything without the Half-Life name to sell the game for them, they will just have absolutely no idea what to do.
Games that should be cancelled, or seriously retooled, end up shipping and doing poorly, or lingering in production for months draining company resources. Games that need more time are rushed out the door. And finally, when a game falls into their lap that has the gaming press of the Western world salivating like mad, they flip out and cancel it.
And let's be honest here. Even though it sounds a little insane if you look at it from the wrong perspective ("a scenic sandstone valley near Mexican Hat in San Juan County, Southeastern Utah, United States, what's the appeal in that?!"), Valve has no adventure game, short of making up Half-Life adventure games, that will ever be as marketable as In the Valley of Gods. Not Monkey Island 6, not Day of the Tentacle 2. Even the Portal adventure game franchise has been muddled beyond recognition at this point. In the Valley of Gods pack personality, edginess, and firearms in unmentionable places like no other Valve game series -- actually like no other game series at all, and they do it in a way that basically anybody can laugh at. There are very few people with any size sense of humor who, after hearing them utter just a few sentences, aren't sold on the quality of the characters and the humor. And on top of that, unlike basically any other sequel Valve could consider, In the Valley of Gods has no back story, no possible way of alienating new players.
In the Valley of Gods is weird, granted, but is there anybody out there who genuinely thinks they're less accessible than Left 4 Dead: Survivors? Less intriguing on a store shelf than The Lab? Yes, in fact, there is. The Valve sales department.
I can see where they're coming from, in a way. If every game without a Half-Life logo that came through your door ended up tanking, getting cancelled, or somehow cause you a huge amount of grief, you might be inclined to just kill the next one in line and get it over with. In a way, their behavior like that is understandable. However, it becomes entirely unacceptable when you remember, that's not their job! Their job is to actually think about things, figure out what's been going wrong, and how to fix it. Their job is to actually try, not to just throw the switch, or pass the title along 'till its out the door, and then attempt to absolve themselves of blame.
Today's an extremely sad day for Valve, and we hope they all know it. If they can't even figure that out, they're in far worse trouble than we could have imagined.
I don't know if you guys have been following the scandal - and no feeling person could blame you for trying to hide from the awful truth - but it's "come out" that traditional music in the public domain has occasionally been quoted in the Monkey Island soundtracks. INNOCENCE LOST.
You might think that's something, but it gets even worse than those moral arbiters on the front page are willing to scar you with. I won't patronize you by omission. I have it on good authority that Loom flat-out pilfered music from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. Oh, wrap yourself in the fuzzy slanket of denial if you must; that won't make it any less true.
Hold on! This just in: In the 18th century setting of Day of the Tentacle, recognizable patriotic tunes like "My Country Tis of Thee" are snuck into the tracks involving the founding fathers and Betsy Ross. Did they really think they could get away with this?
I am not done updating your ethos, my naive friend. Turns out, the ubiquitous Latin sequence "Dies Irae," incorporated into perhaps hundreds of works, is woven into the God Machine room in Fate of Atlantis. But that's far from the worst offence. Hang onto your hat for this next one -- the very same game, in a total rejection of all decency, also has the shameless audacity to steal the Raiders of the Lost Ark theme song. I mean, that's the kind of chutzpah you can't even get offended by, because you are too busy admiring the sheer gall of it.
Burn your diskettes.
I said last year I was planning on reposting classic websites in the summer, but I had a tough year last year and my original plans didn't work out.
It's not done yet, but since I teased it so long ago, I thought I'd give a sneak peek. I'm posting this at Behind Mojo since almost none of the links are working yet, but at least you'll get to see some progress getting done.
http://wecmuseum.org/summerofsamandmax/You may recall that, in the past ten years or so, we discovered to our joy/amazement that Mixnmojo.com is the only place on the entire Internet to use the phrase "sexy weekend in France." Thinking that this absurd claim to fame couldn't possibly be still true, I Googled and, well, see for yourself:
I don't get it, either; maybe France doesn't know diddlysquat about sexy weekends. But god bless the anonymous romantic who first Googled this into the collective Mojo consciousness, anyway.
Like Telltale and Kevin Bruner's career, the Fact of the Moment is yesterday's news. Until Zaarin and/or Remi resurrects it, anyway. If they resurrect it. Not sure how crazy we are about resurrection. I'm sure we've all read Pet Sematary.
The damn thing was updated once every four months, anyway. But I was updating it once every two weeks at the end, there. Did you notice?
