There’s not much more to say, really. Jack Black, his YouTube channel, Brütal Legend. Watch it like crazy:
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GOG.com's got most of their Double Fine catalogue on sale, including AAA games like Psychonauts and Brutal Legend, smaller fare like Massive Chalice (I had to make that joke), and LucasArts reissues like Grim Fandango: Remastered and Day of the Tentacle: Remastered. The exception is funky sci-fi platformer Headlander, which is coincidentally the only one of the lot I don't own. Maybe next time, Headlander.
As is par for the course with GOG, getting the games gets you all sorts of extra goodies.
Other games are on sale, too, including Samorost.
Thanks to Javier Tolstoi for bringing this to our attention.
Source: GOG
While we've been somewhat worried about Starbreeze's current financial issues (what with them publishing Psychonauts 2 and all), Tim himself has soothing words for us through GameIndustry.biz.
"At a show like DICE, other publishers come by and say, 'Yeah, how's that going? If anything happens, give us a call,'" he said. "With Psychonauts 2 having been high profile and already having a great trailer out there, there would be enough interest in other people funding it and finishing it if something happened. But I've got no reason to believe Starbreeze isn't going to come through and publish it well."
See, it's all good, and going by the previous times in the past years we've been assured not to worry — Trump will never be elected president, Brexit won't happen, etc. — we see no reason for this to go down the toilet either.
Mojo: Cynical Since 1997™.
Source: Jason
Actually, he granted an interview to The Hollywood Reporter, or more specifically its hosted blog Heat Vision, in one of apparently many press encounters Tim had during last week's D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas. Still though, be a sport and check out what he has to say about Psychonauts 2:
You are an established voice in this industry –
Oh, established voice. I like that.
Does that make it harder for you to live up to expectations when you’re releasing a new game like Psychonauts 2?
I don’t think about that too much. I think the reason we made the first game was that we were just making what we enjoyed. I think we’re doing that again. You definitely think more about your obligations to the characters than to the audience. We definitely keep in mind the player’s experience from the first game, but it’s what’s true to these characters and what situations do we want to put them in and how will they react. That’s more of what I think about.
When do you decide to come back to a series?
For a long time, we never did it. Psychonauts 2 is really my first time going back to a narrative but it doesn’t really feel like going back to it because you get into this frame of mind when I made the first game and we had all these hooks and plotlines that we put in the first game for the next game. We always thought we’d do a second one but it kind of got shelved for a few years. It was surprisingly easy to inhabit those heads again just because you know them really well.
The full interview isn't a whole lot longer, but read it anyway.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
During last week's DICE Summit in Las Vegas, Tim found himself cornered by a journalist at VentureBeat; the result is this interview in which various Double Fine topics are touched upon. Points of interest:
- Tim is currently in a dialog-writing crunch on Psychonauts 2
- Pixar has yet to confess to nakedly poaching Tim's ideas with Inside Out and Coco
- Double Fine has a team working on "secret, unannounced thing"
Fortunately, Tim does not mention any publisher troubles, so I guess we can rest easy that the impact of Starbreeze's recent woes does not extend to Psychonauts 2. Although you have to admit, it would be downright Shakespearean given that we're almost exactly fifteen years downriver of this.
Anyhow, read the whole article here.
Source: VentureBeat
It’s catch-up month here at Mojo, and some of you may (or may not) find interest in Double Fine-regular Jack Black’s new video series, "Jablinski." Edited by his son, the videos have a charmingly lo-fi quality, with content more sincere than most of the gaming dreck out there. (Naturally, fans of the latter have taken to their regular channels to whine about . . . I don’t even know what.) Anyway, give it a watch.
I'll let Jason explain this one himself:
Jason noticed that more than the average number of folks were logged into the Mojo admin Slack channel at once, so he seized the opportunity to revive a time-honored, zero-effort manner of generating feature content that had long fallen out of fashion: reprinted chat logs!
This time, join Jason, Remi, Zaarin, Bennyboy(!), and elTee as they talk about the Psychonauts 2 trailer.
42 hours, 50 minutes, and 24 seconds. At the time of writing, that's how much time you've got to grab Full Throttle for free from GOG. Already own it? Gift it! 'tis the season.
Psychonauts 2 just got its first trailer, courtesy of the Game Awards. It's lookin' pretty good. The stylish art design makes for a pleasing combination with the shiny new graphics engine.
Source: YouTube
Microsoft, Majesco, and now Starbreeze… The publisher of the forthcoming Psychonauts-sequel has hit its own version of "marketplace realities," after Overkill’s The Walking Dead tanked. That’s right. The Walking Dead. You can’t even make this up.
Exactly how this economic face-slap will affect Psychonauts 2 is currently unknown, but as operations are under review and courts are involved with the reconstruction, things could probably be looking rosier.
Meanwhile, Al Lowe is auctioning off his Sierra memorabilia!
Have you ever wanted to see Tim present eight inspirations for Grim Fandango? Of course you have, and if you use Twitter, you probably actually have already done so, but in case you haven’t… Here ya go:
I might have missed . . . something, seeing I can’t find an announcement from Double Fine . . . but Costume Quest, quite possibly the most charming games in the Mojo-verse, is being turned into an animated series for Amazon. There’s even a trailer:
OK, I was a bit quick on the trigger last time, but Grim is officially out on Switch now, unless Double Fine is lying to all of us. Don’t have a Switch? No worries -- iam8bit has your back, with a boxed PS4 20th Anniversary Edition for $30, and also a soundtrack on vinyl for $40. Go shell out.
There are also "more announcements coming real soon!" so we’re pretty sure Grim 2 will be announced in the next few hours.
Look, I don't know what this whole Discord thing really is -- we use it for podcast recording (two more have been recorded -- start bugging Zaarin to finish editing them) -- but apparently they've built a store. Because we need another one? Either way, Psychonauts and Brütal Legend are available for free with "Nitro" (I don't even know), so go grab them if that's your thing. Discord, that is. Double Fine obviously already is.
Limited Run Games announced on Twitter that a physical Broken Age release will be available for pre-order on the 12th of October, and will only be available for two weeks. The Limited Run Switch release of Broken Age joins its PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita brethren, as the latter had physical versions released by Limited Run Games back in 2017.
Switch cartridge production takes a while and once the cartridges are finished, they need to be shipped from Japan to the United States, where Limited Run Games will pack the cartridge in a standard Switch case. The cool thing about these Limited Run Switch releases is that each game comes with a complete byte-sized manual, which is a really rare thing nowadays.
Because of the long production time, it's likely that the Limited Run physical release of Broken Age for Switch won't ship until January.
Late night host Conan O'Brien maintains a pretty active online presence, and one of the things his digital wing sometimes does is post video game live streams to the Conan Youtube channel. These streams are hosted by the Conan team's resident gamer Aaron Bleyaert.
Well, it looks like the latest one of these deals was for Grim Fandango. The stream just ended, but it is available on Youtube for posterity. I kinda skimmed through it, and it looks like Aaron liked the game, without getting very far. Check it out below:
Got an old Xbox 360 Brütal Legend disc laying around? Well, for god's sake, pick it up and put it in your Xbox One, which now is backward compatible with the game. And then play the damn thing.
(That's all I got.)
First, Grim Fandango and Broken Age are out on the Switch, so go grab them if you can’t get enough Tim and/or beauty in your life. The latter (and I assume the former) is available for $14.99.
Poker Night 2, meanwhile, is not available anymore. In an unusually un-cheerful message, Telltale states: "Poker Night 2 has been withdrawn from sale on digital platforms due to the expiration of our digital distribution agreement. We currently do not have any plans to renew this agreement." You can still download the game if you already own it.
(I have no clue which license expired, but I like to pretend it’s Sam & Max.)
Finally, for more Tim, check out (in the sage words of AlfredJ, our exclusive source) "this Reddit biography video thing." I haven’t watched it, but apparently there is a shot of Curse of Monkey Island forty-four seconds in, so consider that official word of Double Fine’s next re-master. Watch.
Update! OK, so Grim isn't technically out yet, but it will be. Someday.
So here’s a story that literally opens with the name "James Spafford," our benevolent founder who embarrassingly forgets to mention Mojo in it. We aren’t bitter, though, and will gladly link to Polygon’s write-up on the Double Fine summer camp, where the $10,000-Psychonauts 2-backers, company employees, and Double Fine forum moderators rubbed shoulders for three days. We can only assume our invitation got lost in the mail, although one of our infrequent collaborators did attend as a member of the latter group.
(Wait, am I coming across as bitter?)
Every Double Fine and Psychonauts fan should run over and read the story right now, because why the hell not?
Source: Polygon