The International House of Mojo

ScummVM, the program that lets you play classic adventure games on modern computers, consoles, phones, and tablets, has been updated with support for four new engines, bringing support for six new games: 3 Skulls of the Toltecs, Eye of the Beholder, Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon, Hopkins FBI, Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths, and The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime.

In addition to the new games, there's support for the Macintosh version of Discworld 1. And, of most relevance to Mojo readers, music is now improved in the Macintosh version of many LucasArts adventures. If you're not interested in Macintosh versions of adventure games, this version comes with major bugfixes to the bike fight sequences on Old Mine Road in Full Throttle.

There are also other changes included as well, such as an update to the latest Roland MT-32 emulation code, a new grid chooser for save games, an extended FluidSynth configuration dialog, and Belarusian, Finnish and Galician translations for the GUI dialogs.

Ron Gilbert is watching and commenting. Click here and be happy.

ScummVM release testing season is upon us again, as version 1.6.0 of the program that lets you play classic adventure games on modern platforms nears release. The ScummVM team needs your help testing the new games which will added to ScummVM this release: 3 Skulls of the Toltecs, Eye of the Beholder, Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon, Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths, and The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime.

Additionally, they need your help testing Hopkins FBI, which will be added to ScummVM 1.6.0 only if they get testing results on several platforms for several versions of the game (which includes BeOS, OS/2, Linux and Windows). Also, in what is of the most interest to Mojo readers, they are looking for people to test Full Throttle.

So, if you have any of the games listed, help the team out by testing the game out using a daily build of ScummVM, posting any bugs you might find to their bug tracker, and reporting your findings on their forums, so they can update their 1.6.0 Release Testing page. Remember, stick to their release testing guidelines, and as always, happy adventuring!

Here's some small bits of Mojo related news for the month of March:

First of all, the first look at Telltale's upcoming series based the comic book series Fables will take place at the Fablescon in Rochester, MN this Saturday during a panel with Richard Iggo from Telltale and Fables creator Bill Willingham. The two will reveal "a few visuals from the game, and give away as few secrets as they can hold on to."

Secondly, do you remember the Indiegogo campaign for Dominique Pamplemousse in "It's All Over Once the Fat Lady Sings!", the black and white claymation detective adventure game presented as a musical with singing by Deidre Kiai (former programmer on Deathspank and even further back a former intern at Telltale Games)?

No? Well, you'll get a chance to rectify that and buy a copy for yourself on Windows, Mac, or iPad on April 1st. If you were one of the lucky who backed the Indiegogo campaign at a tier high enough to come with a copy of the game, you are even more lucky, as you are able to get it now. Check your e-mail, since you should have already received a link to get the game.

I've played it, and I can attest that it's well worth the money. Play the demo and see if the musical style fits your tastes. If it does, don't hesitate to buy it once it's available, since the story and detective style dialog-based puzzles are excellent.

ResidualVM, the sister project of ScummVM designed to run Grim Fandango on modern systems (with official builds on Windows, Mac, and Linux), has received a bug fix update. And what an update it is! There's around 40 gameplay fixes in the newest release, including fixes for 14 bugs that were present in the original 1998 release, making ResidualVM the best way to run Grim even if you have a computer that can handle the original executable.

ResidualVM, the interpreter that allows users to play 3D adventure games on modern PCs, has reached a major milestone. After 9 years of development (the ]initial revision of Residual (the original name of ResidualVM) was released by former ScummVM and ResidualVM project leader James "Ender" Brown on August 15, 2003), the first stable release is here, with full support for Grim Fandango. The stable build, version 0.1.0, is available to download for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

PC Gamer conducted an interview with Ron Gilbert, where Ron stated that he wants to make a Monkey Island game and that he intends on talking to Disney at some point about getting the rights to Monkey Island so he can “really make the game I want to make.” However, he also stated that he wasn't optimistic that he'd ever retrieve the series he created, saying that Disney seems like a company which "hoards IP". And in a related interview with Metro about The Cave where they discuss Ron contacting Disney about making a Monkey Island game, Ron states that he wouldn't be willing to change the genre of Monkey Island for a new game stating that "Monkey Island has to be a point 'n' click adventure game".

There's another Ron Gilbert interview at Eurogamer, where Ron explains why his upcoming adventure game, The Cave, has no inventory.

Telltale is raking up the awards for The Walking Dead, including 5 awards from Spike TV's Video Game Awards: "Game of the Year", "Best Adapted Video Game", "Best Downloadable Game", "Best Performance By a Human Female" (for Melissa Hutchinson's Clementine), and "Studio of the Year". Telltale was also awarded "Best Downloadable Game" and "Best Character Design" for Lee Everett at the Inside Gaming Awards.

ResidualVM is making progress on its supported games. Escape from Monkey Island is now playable to Lucre Island (and is still a work in progress, and not officially supported), and ResidualVM's only supported non-LucasArts game, Myst 3, is now completable with glitches and missing features (as of the December 9 daily builds). The ResidualVM team can still also use your help in testing Grim Fandango (which is fully completable and fully supported). They request that any bugs that you encounter be submitted to the issue tracker and that you post on their forums when you complete the game.

The UK's Channel 4 commissioned an online adventure game inspired by LucasArts classics for their animated sitcom, Full English. The game contains five chapters (which are individually selectable at any time) and features Day of The Tentacle inspired multiple playable characters with inventory sharing. It also includes references to a certain Lucasfilm license.

Here's another post chock full of tidbits related to the companies Mojo covers, but that aren't big enough news to warrant their own news post.

Double Fine's Middle Manager of Justice should be coming out for the public on iOS soon. The team is still hard at work killing bugs, polishing the game, and addressing feedback they have received from the people who have become beta testers after the accidental release of the game this summer. In the meantime, to tide fans over until the game is released, there's a nice blog post over at Double Fine about the origins of Middle Manager of Justice as an amnesia fortnight prototype, including the original pitch video and character concepts.

Also, for those of you (if there are any of you reading Mojo, which is doubtful) who haven't yet pre-ordered Double Fine Adventure, there's still time to become a slacker backer at the current $15 USD price tag. That price includes the game once it's finished in DRM free form for PC, Mac, or Linux and a Steam code to get the game through the Steam client, access to the unfinished beta on Steam (once it's available), and digital access to the Double Fine Adventure documentary series. You'll get over a dozen of the Double Fine Adventure documentary videos right now. In a week the price will be raised to $30 USD, to reflect the amount of goods you'll recieve, as well as how much you'll receive immediately (as opposed to before, when there weren't as many goodies already available to backers).

Finally, the Grim Fandango inspired The Journey Down: Chapter One, the first part of a four chapter game, by Mojo forum poster Skygoblin, is now available on IndieGameStand at a pay-what-you-wish deal (starting at only $1 USD). It's well worth picking up, if you haven't already. It's an excellent chapter that's a great tribute to the LucasArts classics, while holding it's own amongst them.

It's rare when a fan game comes along that is inspired by both Sierra and LucasArts adventure games, but Pledge Quest II: Noodle Shop of Horrors (or Vohaul the Cat's Revenge) certainly falls in that group. It was created to support the SpaceVenture stretch goals through Paypal. Since SpaceVenture is created by the Guys from Andromeda, the creators of Space Quest, the jokes and references primarily relate to the Space Quest series and related games. However, the primary plot device is inspired by a classic LucasArts adventure, and there's references to a certain property that was licensed by Telltale as well.

The game itself is a three room adventure that is kind of a blend of both worlds, having the interface of Sierra games with the game philosophy of most LucasArts games. You can't die in this game (although if you look hard enough, you'll find at least one reference to Sierra's death sequences). It's a well made fan game that is well worth playing. The one room original Pledge Quest is fun as well, if you haven't tried it yet.

Source: Decaffeinated Jedi

Update January 14, 2014: The game's website is now dead, but the game is not. Stacy Davidson clarified that he killed the website because he'd rather have the game fly under the radar by developing it quietly and then releasing it when it's done, in order to avoid the legal department of Disney. The new link to the demo can be found at this thread on his game development company's forums.

Remember that Han Solo fan game by Stacy Davidson that we posted about a few years ago?

The game has made quite a bit of progress since we last posted it. So much in fact, that Mr. Davidson has released a playable demo on the game's twitter page. If the demo is anything to go by, the game is shaping up to be a fine homage to the classic LucasArts adventures. The short three room demo already shows quite a few references to the Star Wars movies and to LucasArts' classic adventure games.

Dominique Pamplemousse in "It's All Over Once the Fat Lady Sings!" is a unique musical (with singing!) detective adventure game using stop motion animation by Deidra Kiai, who worked on Deathspank and was formerly an intern at Telltale Games. It is currently on Indiegogo (a service akin to kickstarter) to fund it, and the goal amount is a paltry $9,500.

She has a demo of the game available in flash available on her website. It's likely to be the only stop motion musical adventure game released any time soon, so give it your support.

So you picked up the Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords in the bundle that has just been released with the original Knights of the Old Republic for PC by LucasArts. You may be wondering why The Sith Lords feels unfinished. That's because it was. LucasArts had Obsidian rush the game to make a Christmas 2004 release. That meant they had to delete or truncate a lot of content that was meant for the game, including the ending. Obsidian reportedly requested that LucasArts release an official update to the game to restore the game to Obsidian's original vision, but LucasArts denied the request.

Luckily, Obsidian included the cut content in the game's data files, and fans have gone to work restoring it. There was a fan project called The Sith Lords Restoration Project, but that project was uncompleted and the team disbanded in 2010. The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod has been filling that void. The newest release, 1.8, was released a few days ago. This release fixes many of the bugs from the official release and adds all of the deleted content that The Sith Lords Restoration Project did, as well as the rest of the cut content that the former mod intended to incorporate (which is all of the deleted content with the exception of the cut planet M4-78). You can view the full list of content the mod includes here.

You can't chuck a box of Tentacle Chow anywhere in Germany without it hitting someone working on a Maniac Mansion fan game. But the one brought to my attention by Cyrus7 on our forums is a little bit different.

Crazy Mansion presents an original story that takes place in the universe of the Maniac Mansion while adroitly sidestepping copyrighted names in order to escape legal problems. The team is a group of longtime friends and Maniac Mansion fans who call themselves Desperate Studios and have apparently been tinkering with homemade game development since the Commodore 64 days.

They seem to have gotten far along enough in the conceptual phase of Crazy Mansion to show off a bunch of stuff and are trying their hand at crowdsourcing the game's development - check out their indiegogo campaign where you can read an overview of the project as well as see a bunch of concept art and the following trailer. I do like the art style they've landed on:

Garry M. Gaber, who worked on LucasArts Star Wars titles of varying critical acclaim (including Rebel Assault II, Shadows of the Empire, Jedi Knight, Force Commander and the Galactic Battlegrounds series) has launched a kickstarter campaign for a new Space Combat Simulator 'Starlight Express Inception' for PC and... Playstation Vita?

You know the deal, here's the Kickstarter page - $150,000 needed (~$40,000 at the time of writing).

Of special interest is this:

So, not only a chance to fund, but also a chance for modders to work on the game.

Good luck, maybe this will also inspire Larry Holland, who is the person most associated with the Star Wars Space Combat Simulator legacy.

Edit: If you don't want to wade through the screeds of text on the Kickstarter page, Gaming Union have just posted this interview with Garry M. Gaber regarding the game.

Update: The game just squeezed over the funding goal, so we can expect a new space combat simulator to come out sometime next year(?).

Source: Kickstarter

Mass Effect 3, the latest RPG-ish game from popular developer Bioware, got released this March. The game's ending - a cop-out that marred an otherwise brilliant, meticulously crafted saga about space and the aliens humanity would someday alternatively blow up and sleep with - caused a slight implosion on some parts of the internet, prompting several thousand users to campaign to "Retake Mass Effect". These protesters have donated to charity in the name of the cause, but have also asked for the game's ending to be changed.

This is where it gets relevant. PC Gamer decided to ask several game writers and designers what they think of this, and whether Bioware should or should not comply to what these fans want. Of relevance to Mixnmojo are Chuck Jordan (The Curse of Monkey Island, The Devil's Playhouse), Dave Grossman (Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, Day of the Tentacle) and Gary Whitta (The Walking Dead), and of slightly more tangential relevance is Steve Gaynor (Idle Thumbs, Bioshock 2: Minerva's Den). All interviewees provide interesting answers, and the article is worth a read.

Source: PC Gamer

The clever chaps at ResidualVM (the 3D sister to ScummVM) have finally discovered the reason for the missing dialogue at the end of Grim Fandango. As it turns out it wasn't a design choice, it was a simple bug...

A bug so buried that apparently not even Tim Schafer was aware of its existence:

The bug is now fixed for players using the latest version of ResidualVM to play Grim Fandango.

You can get ResidualVM for free here: http://www.residualvm.org

Source: ResidualVM.org

Thanks to Igor Hardy, occasionally known as "Ascovel", for the two stories below.

Firstly, Peter McConnell - a former LucasArts composer who was responsible for the Grim Fandango soundtrack, the Psychonauts soundtrack, and many others - was interviewed by Alternative Magazine Online. Seeing that Peter is known to lesser mortals as "Peter goddamn McConnell", you really ought to read the interview. I wish I could, but my current internet speed, thanks to some ISP-related mix-ups, isn't allowing anything to load.

That same speed problem isn't allowing me to view this interview, again with a former LucasArts person. This time it's with Mark Soderwall, who worked on The Force Unleashed. What little I've been to see of that seemed interesting.

You should give them both a look and tell what you think.

Source: Alternative Magazine Online

In a recent blog entry on Gamasutra, Noah Falstein speaks of news that should interest you. He, along with three other folk from LucasArts' earliest days - Chip Morningstar, Randy Farmer, and Gary Winnick - have founded a new company called Suddenly Social, "a start-up that is part game development studio, part platform as a service company." Their Board of Advisors apparently includes Randy Breen. (!!)

Sometime this month will see the release of their first game, Bad Pets, an iPhone project which is apparently akin to an eight-player rock, paper scissors with weapon-brandishing puppies and kittens. Check out their web site for more info.

Source: Gamasutra

As noted by Benny on the forums, some enterprising fellow has adapted the recent Psychonauts Steam update into a patch for all other PC versions of the games (meaning retail and digital versions from non-Steam vendors) so that we too may enjoy the enhancements.

Download the patch, which may or may not blow up your computer, here.

Source: GOG Forums

And I'm less snide about it this time.

LucasArts creative director Clint Hocking has published another opinion piece for Edge. This one voices his concern for yearly sequels:

Not hard to agree with that which he opines, but, am I a jerk if my overall reaction to this piece is, "No duh?"

The project Hocking is working on at LucasArts at the moment remains unannounced.

Source: Edge Magazine