The International House of Mojo

We're not quite through selflessly promoting "Video Game History Hour" - that would be the podcast of the Video Game History Foundation - which just last week delivered another Mojo-baiting episode by having Noah Falstein as their guest.

Noah's always a great listen, and this is no exception. He also at one point mentions having a "thick stack of design docs" still in his possession, which can only be interpreted as fishing for a bribe. Anyway, treat yourself to recollections from one of the industry's most storied careers, and thank me later.

Source: Video Game History Hour

You remember Kevin Bruner, former CEO of Telltale Games? Well, he's back... in Dramatic Labs form.

The new games studio collective is "an independent collaboration of 20+ former Telltale writers, developers, designers, artists, and producers" according to their website. Their launch title taps into the beloved, and currently much expanding Star Trek franchise, and they even have a very Telltale-esque teaser trailer to show for their efforts. Behold Star Trek: Resurgence.

The standalone, non-episodic game is due next spring for PC, Playstation and Xbox. And, err, they're hiring!

Source: Dramatic Labs

What we in the business call Xbox Games Showcase Extended happened today, and during it Tim gave a presentation about Psychonauts 2. He describes the game’s setup in pretty good detail, offering a more expansive look at the overworld than I’ve seen so far. It all starts at 16:40 in the video below.

Sixteen years after Maniac Mansion Deluxe, another LucasArts oldie has received a fan remake of astonishing care – the oldie, it could be argued. The decade-long labor of love Fractalus is now available for Windows, MacOS and Linux, and it’s probably as fine example of this sort of thing that comes along. May I present my first witness: the project lead of the 1984 original?

If that’s not enough to make you download the game, I’m not sure what else can be done for ya. Highest marks to the Australian enthusiast who apparently masterminded this. One wonders: is the Land Down Under to Rescue on Fractalus! what Germany is to the SCUMM games?

Source: Luke's software and design.

So apparently, back in 2016, when Campo Santo was both a small, scrappy company putting out a fun newsletter and in existence, they put out this game called Firewatch. The critically acclaimed game was scored by one estimable Chris Remo, and the soundtrack, on vinyl, sold out.

Woe, as the kids say. Anyway, if you've wanted to get the soundtrack on vinyl since then, you'd have had to sell a kidney and score it on eBay. Except as of last week, when Remo put (what is likely the) final printing up on Kickstarter for all you surface noise-loving, guitar-strumming tree huggers hopefully-locked-indoors out there. (I joke because I'm one of you, except the guitar bit.) Grab it here.

Source: Kickstarter

Being cool and popular, we recently received the following email:

Do I need to draw you a road map? Go download those digitally liberated soundtracks right now!

Source: Bandcamp

In the last few days a reporter at PC Gamer has noticed several strange goings-on at Campo Santo, the game developer started in part by ex-Telltale and ex-Mojo Jake Rodkin. They report some disappearances of mentions of the game-in-progress Valley of the Gods:

But they also point out that the game website is still up, as its Steam holding page. Jake could clear this up, but what are the odds of that?

Source: PC Gamer

A post today on game developer Dynamighty's facebook page confirmed the studio, who had a well received release in Counterspy, has closed down. And as a double blow, one of the founding members passed away.

Condolences to Mark's family, friends and colleagues. You can read the full post here

If Counterspy passed you by, here's a taste of what you've missed.

Direct Link

Source: Facebook

Some sad news is making the rounds today, reporting the death of programmer Stephen Ash, a veteran of LucasArts, Double Fine, Ion Storm Dallas, Factor 5 and his most permanent home, id Software.

Ash's career at LucasArts included work on Grim Fandango, and like a number of developers on the Grim team, he was one of the earliest employees of Double Fine, where he developed the physics system for Psychonauts. Tim acknowledged his contribution and passing in the following tweet:

Source: Gamasutra

The most colorful expression of the white-out outrage that was ignited by the cancellation of Sam & Max 2 undoubtedly came from The Wibble Wobble Hat Stand (W.W.H.S.), which found its true calling as an “LEC Hate Site” in March 2004. Refusing to stop at merely collecting the various works of “hate art” righteously spewed forth by the greater Mojo community, deceased virtuoso Gabez went the extra mile and produced a few games of grandiose hostility under the W.W.H.S. banner. Despite their uncommon artistic virtue, these Adventure Factory classics have been sadly lost to time.

Or have they? Don’t ask me how, but we’ve managed to locate copies and get them uploaded, an act of nobility that we figure is at least as big a deal as Netflix finishing Orson Welles’s last movie. There are no guarantees that these will work on your machine, but then, wasn’t that the case from day one? So download these zip files and try the executables out for yourself. They’re probably not just viruses:

(NB! The games currently only work on Windows (or Wine). We expect ScummVM will add support any day now. - Remi)

• LEC Killer
• LEC Killer 2: Ron Gilbert's Revenge
• Ron Gilbert's Christmas Challenge

ScummVM and its sister project, ResidualVM are participating in the Google Summer of Code once again.

This year, the students are working on the following games:

ScummVM:

Pink Panther: Passport to Peril and Pink Panther: Hokus Pokus Pink. Student: Andrii Prykhodko

The Immortal. Student: Joseph-Eugene Winzer

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and Star Trek: Judgment Rites. Student: Matthew Stewart

ResdiualVM:

The Longest Journey (currently completable with missing features). Student: Liu Zhaosong

While we're on the subject of ScummVM and ResidualVM, both projects have had updates lately:

ResidualVM 0.31 has been released. This is a bugfix release that fixes a few bugs in Myst III, in preparation for Cyan's upcoming digital release of Myst III that will use ResidualVM to play the game.

ScummVM's addition of Xeen, the first RPG engine added after ScummVM changed their guidelines to allow RPG games alongside the adventure games, is now completable in the daily builds. There are five RPGs that are currently completable: Might and Magic IV, Might and Magic V, World of Xeen, World of Xeen 2 (CD Talkie), and Swords of Xeen. If you want to play these games in the daily builds, make sure that you place xeen.css in the same folder as your game files.

After a savage bidding war (Mojo offered a Planet Threepwood coupon and a bloody molar), Valve ultimately won out and has officially acquired Firewatch developer Campo Santo, it's been announced. The vaunted, twelve-person studio will relocate to Bellevue, Washington where they will continue to make In the Valley of Gods and swat away attempts by their new neighbor Remi to gain access for exclusives.

Though we don't know what to make of this news, we congratulate these hardworking virtuosi (and Jake) for selling out securing a future with what look to be ideal partners. We anticipate it will be a future glittered with many golden trophies. Or it will turn out like Humongous. Either way!

Source: Campo Santo blog

Here's your first non Remi posted news in over a month!

You may recall Mojo reporting back in December 2016 on a new game engine for X-Wing being created by modder Azrapse. Well, the mod has now entered a Pre-Alpha testing state. If this news isn't exciting enough, check out the comments on the associated Kotaku article, where you'll see one Laserschwert say;

I mean, I assume it's the same Laserschwert? If not, this really was a crappy way to break Remi's run.

Source: Kotaku Australia

That's right, he'll answer any question. Provided that you asked it yesterday, because that's when Noah's AMA happened. Lots of good stuff in there, though.

Source: Reddit

If you've ever wished to fire up the original LucasArts classic space combat simulator X-Wing and are dismayed at the DOS version's low-res graphics, or the XWING95's lack of iMuse soundtrack, then Azrapse might be a modder you'd like to keep your eye on.
In a similar manner to the the way the XL Engine runs the original Dark Forces game files in an enhanced way, this XWVM mod uses a Unity based engine to interpret and run the original X-Wing game files.

YouTube Link

Azrapse says:

The mod creator has been discussing iMuse and ship models in the long running XWA Upgrade Project's forums. I wish Azrapse the best of luck with this project - may it one day see the light of day!

Source: Mod DB

ScummVM is the project that aims to re-create the engines used in adventure games (and, since this year's Google Summer of Code, role-playing games) so they can be played on systems ranging from Windows, Mac, and Linux to iOS, Android, and even consoles such as Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, and Wii.

Right before a major release they do a public testing phase for new and improved games, which helps them iron out any remaining bugs. This testing cycle includes two new games: Myst (and Myst: Masterpiece Edition) and U.F.O.s (also known as Gnap). There also have been a lot of improvements in the SCI engine as of late, so they are also testing Conquests of the Longbow, Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist, King's Quest V, King's Quest VI, Quest for Glory 1 VGA, Quest for Glory 3, Space Quest 1 VGA, and Space Quest 4. Other games that have seen recent improvements and are undergoing testing include Beneath a Steel Sky, the Commodore-64 version of Maniac Mansion, Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Rose Tattoo, and Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel.

So, if you have any of those games, play them through in a daily build of ScummVM on your platform of choice, and report any bugs you find at the new and improved ScummVM bug tracker. Then tell the team about your experience, and any bugs you filed (or if you didn't spot any bugs at all) in this thread on the ScummVM forum.

You've really got to admire this kind of stubbornness.

A fan-made remake of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis has been incubating for over two years now. I'm not clear on how far along the project is - indeed I've lost track of the Fate of Atlantis fan projects over the years - but the Facebook page has screenshots.

Labors of love like this traditionally just get put out at the risk of cease-and-desist orders, such as 2004's Maniac Mansion Deluxe, which as far as I know faced no legal repudiation, although the risk of getting the kibosh rises steeply when fans start dabbling in the big IPs, specifically Star Wars and Indy.

Whether for that reason or some other, the team has apparently sent a formal request to Disney to obtain a license for this remake. They even included some schwag! I find this admirable and crazy in roughly equal measure, but color me impressed.

I have a hard time imagining these good folks will get a response, much less approval, but I'm also a curmudgeon-y bastard without a sliver of optimism. At any rate, this has gotta be unprecedented, no? Correct me below if I'm wrong or at least join me in being awed by this team's hard work and indomitable spirit that's reminiscent of Indy himself.

Source: Facebook

ScummVM, the project that allows multiple point and click adventure games to be played on modern (and some not so modern) architectures, has been updated to 1.8.0. New in this release is support for ten new games:

• Amazon: Guardians of Eden
• Beavis and Butthead in Virtual Stupidity
• Broken Sword 2.5: The Return of the Templars
• Labyrinth of Time
• Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender
• Sfinx
• The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Rose Tattoo
• The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel
• Zork: Grand Inquisitor
• Zork Nemesis: The Forbidden Lands

Additionally, there are new ports for GCW-Zero and Raspberry Pi. The graphics subsystem for the Sierra AGI engine has been overhauled, and the SCUMM engine has also received some love. The original Maniac Mansion walking code for the V0 and V1 version of the game has been implemented, Maniac Mansion can now be played from within Day of the Tentacle, and lip sync animation has been improved in later Humongous Entertainment games.

There's a whole lot more new with this release, as it's been a long time coming, so head over to the ScummVM site and give it a spin.

I finally got myself familiarized with ScummGen, the compiler that takes C-style code and compiles it into resources used by the actual SCUMM engine (used by LucasArts for all of their adventure games from Maniac Mansion to The Curse of Monkey Island, and by Humongous Entertainment in most of their games until 2003). I polished up the ScummGen test game, Indiana Jones and the Call of Thunder.

The original team (Dominik Haslinger, Jens Doblies and Sebastien Ronsse) did the majority of the work. It was originally intended to be a much longer game, but it was cancelled. I finished up the ice cavern sequence so that it could be released as a completely playable game as I thought it would be a shame if no one got to play it. Their sourcecode was playable up to the point where you complete the mechanism in the cavern.

Here are the changes and fixes that I made to that source code:

• Replaced LucasArts logo with a ScummGen logo.
• Made a few grammar corrections to the original script.
• Created icons for inventory items that lacked them (all instances of the stones and the gas can).
• Programmed an if/then statement regarding the gas can that was referenced but not implemented in the source.
• Fixed the mechanism puzzle to require both objects, as before it was possible to complete it with only one object.
• Added dialog to facilitate the change in the mechanism puzzle.
• Fixed the lighting so that the cavern stays lit when you move to the cavern entrance and back.
• Enabled the usage of the item used to exit the cavern, as referenced but not implemented in the source.
• Changed description of the macguffin as it was originally used as a joke related to the game being unfinished (but kept it humourous to suit the tone of the original).
• Added dialog necessary for the ending sequence.
• Added end screen.

You can download it at my itch.io page if you want to try it out. It includes the sourcecode. It doesn't include an executable though, as it needs ScummVM in order to run (and I figured I'd cut out the middle man and just let people run ScummVM on whatever system they wish to run it on). It's detected in ScummVM as Day of the Tentacle.

The latest edition of the Campo Santo Quarterly Review (like The Paris Review, but considerably less New Yorkish) has some news: Firewatch, Campo Santo's first game, releases on PC, PS4, Mac, and Linux February 9th, 2016. And I'd be awesomely excited if I wasn't already awesomely excited. Check your emails for the big news.

(Those of who you don't find the big news in their emails ought to subscribe to the Campo Santo Quarterly Review.)

Firewatch is being developed by a rag-tag crew of the ex-Telltale Gamesies who turned your heart to putty in The Walking Dead: Season One, including ex-Mixnmojo Jake Rodkin. A first person adventure game, it concerns a fire lookout in the Wyoming wilderness at a time when things seem to be going rather...awry.

How awry? Find-out this February!

(And then tell those of us who can't afford a system good enough to play the thing.)