Joe Martin, who last August wrote an excellent retrospective on Habitat, has posted a new episode of his podcast Unlimited Hyperbole. In this instalment, he interviews Brian Moriarty, creator of Loom and an early version of The Dig.
If you're interested in his games and cancelled LucasArts titles, give it a listen!
The community's glory days bore a horn o'plenty of great LEC fan sites, on that we can all agree, but I think my favorite was The LucasArts Museum. You know, the one that endeavored to collect, index and photograph the boxes, manuals, game media, inserts, and all manner of increasingly frivolous and obscure paraphernalia associated with every release version of the LEC adventure games?
As an obsessive myself, that site was my jam, but whenever I'd visit the forums I felt way out of my league. It was both enjoyable and immensely intimidating to peruse threads and see people distinguish between versions based on LFL file datestamps, argue over which pressing a floppy disk label denoted, discover some hitherto unknown budget release of Full Throttle available only from the back of a magazine, and ask for a ballpark on how much the copy of Zak McKracken they stumbled onto at a garage sale was worth on eBay.
Sources close to Kotaku, presumably the same ones that recently revealed Star Wars 1313 is on hold, are now claiming that Star Wars: First Assault, that Battlefront-sounding XBLA shooter that was never officially announced, is no longer assured an existence.
The real scoop is that First Assault was in fact intended to be a sort of proof of concept for a Star Wars shooter running on the Unreal Engine, the success of which will directly lead to Battlefront III. The story is that LEC intentionally kept that brand off of this downloadable multiplayer game, which is nearly finished, "so expectations wouldn't be too high," and would have followed up with the long-awaited sequel.
Well, that was once the idea, anyway. Despite intending to release a closed beta of First Assault in September (which ties in nicely with October's minimal leaked reveal of the game), it seems that LucasArts has pretty much halted all their projects in the wake of the Disney acquisition. The reasoning? Apparently, there may be a sense that the Lucasfilm slate needs cleaning, a theory that the recent cancellation of Clone Wars and a second planned Star Wars TV show certainly seems to support. I'll bet the powers-that-be want all the focus to be on the new film trilogy.
Meanwhile, amidst all this uncertainty and decisions pending, hiring has frozen at LEC and employees have apparently been departing the studio in droves, so what will become of First Assault, 1313, and I guess whatever the hell else LEC has allegedly been up before the last menstrual cycle is an unknown. The author and the commenters seem primarily concerned about the effect LEC's potential euthanasia would have on the integrity of the Star Wars game franchise, which I don't mind telling you is exactly the kind of laugh I needed today.
Oh, and Kotaku also has some leaked footage of Star Wars: First Assault if the prospect rings your chimes.
Tired of hearing us say the same old, predictable, boring truth about LEC? Then let IGN tell you for a change.
LucasArts has had no fewer than five bosses in the last eight years, and none of them – not Jim Ward (2004-2008), Darrell Rodriguez (2008-2010), Paul Meegan (2010-2012), or the current pair of interim co-presidents, Kevin Parker and Gio Corsi – have been able to set a consistent vision for the company. They’ve grown. They’ve shrunk. They’ve dabbled in digital titles and then stopped. They’ve tried to create blockbusters and then given up.
The article goes on to get other things spot on. Not that it matters, I guess.
Peter McConnell, who composed for most of the classic LucasArts adventure games as well as for several Double Fine games, have been interviewed by the Super Marcato Bros in the season 2 finale of their video game music podcast. Head over there to listen to his insights and stories as well as some good music!
Kotaku has a large write-up on the status of Star Wars 1313, with inside sources claiming the game has been put on hold since the Disney acquisition in November 2012. Official sources are saying production is continuing.
In what will surely drive fans of great Star Wars games a bit mad, Underworld/1313 was, we're told, originally going to be an open-world role-playing game similar to the beloved BioWare title Knights of the Old Republic but with episodic character updates delivered regularly over DLC. Story arcs would go to some dark places, touching on terrorism, the dealings of crime families and prostitution.
We're told that the game was scaled back in 2010 after budgetary concerns put the TV show on hold. The game was re-written with a new story that was disconnected from the TV-show material. And this is where what our sources say gets even more interesting. LucasArts supposedly was set to reinvent itself in 2011 under then-studio-president Paul Meegan, attempting to make Star Wars-style games in popular genres. There would be a Star Wars riff on FarmVille and a Call of Duty-style first-person shooter codenamed Trigger.
Screw Star Wars 1313, where's my Tattooine Moisture Farmville game!?
There's another interview with Dan Connors that talks about Telltale's upcoming Fables game, this time at Game Informer. In it, the protaganist is revealed to be Bigby, Fables' big bad wolf. There's also a hint as to how the choice based gameplay that was featured in The Walking Dead might work in Telltale's Fables game:
"Fables is coming along really well. We’ve gone back in and really tried to take a lot of what we learned from The Walking Dead and get that integrated into the story with Bigby and the characters that he meets. We want to make it a real interesting battle for Bigby between: Should he give in to the wolf side, or should he try to get along and keep everybody safe? There’s a lot of work in trying to make that work."
Also, Polygon posted an article with an image from the PlayStation Meeting 2013 showing all the third party companies that are committed to making games for the upcoming PlayStation 4. They mentioned Double Fine by name, but intrepid viewers can also spot the LucasArts and Telltale Games logos among those companies listed.
Not keen to just sit on our laurels with one post this week of tidbits not quite juicy enough to warrant their own stand-alone post, here comes another slew of Mojo related tidbits:
Will the season five finale of The Clone Wars animated television series tie into Star Wars 1313? The HD Room thinks so, and they provide some compelling side-by-sides screenshots of the finale trailer and the 1313 trailer. If nothing else, it certainly does look like the underworld Coruscant from the game.
There's no news on Telltale's King's Quest, but there is news for King's Quest fans. Under the Half Dome is a kickstarter project for an album made up of orchestrated versions of Sierra songs by Ken Allen. If you don't know, Ken Allen was the composer of the music from the VGA remake of King's Quest and King's Quest V (as well as many other Sierra games), and he may or may not work on the music for Telltale's King's Quest (no composer has been announced yet, like everything else about the game). The kickstarter has many interesting tiers to choose from, so much so that it was part of Forbes' 10 Most Clever Kickstarter Rewards list (for their $500 USD and $1,000 USD tier). The base price of the album is $15 USD (for the digital version), and if they hit the $20,000 USD mark, all kickstarter backers will have their first names included in a song inspired by the "Nations of the World" song from Animaniacs.
Apparently part of a series analyzing "gonzo guns" in video games (so, all of them), Gamaustra has a brief piece up examining the legendary Land Shark Gun from Planet Moon's should-have-been blockbuster Armed & Dangerous.
Never played Armed & Dangerous? Dude, it's $4.99 on Steam.
I revive myself from my Mardi Gras-induced stupor to alert you to a piece on Mobiledia about Lucy Bradshaw, a key figure in LucasArts product development back when they developed products worth rallying attention behind.
Bradshaw, whose name might be familiar to you from the opening credits of games like Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, graduated from her "training ground" at LEC in the 90s to become an executive for Maxis/EA. It is the later part of her career that the article largely concerns, but I think she would agree that it was her days being rotoscoped in a wetsuit for The Dig animation tests that truly legitimized the games business as a vocation.
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.
Disney has plans to make a collection of stand-alone movies that will pepper the years in between the big episodic movies.
This way Disney can take advantage of any timeline or untapped character backstory they want. Now comes the rumor: AICN is reporting that the first stand alone film is going to center upon Yoda. And while they don't have any other additional information beyond that rumor, they're fairly certain that this is fact.
Here's a link to the original AICN story, but it's pretty much unreadable.
The clip of Bob Iger in this article confirms that both Lawrence Kasdan and Simon Kinberg are writing standalone films. Each film will be "derived from great Star Wars characters."
How many websites will report this rumor using exaggerated Yoda backwards-speak in their headline? Start counting. Update: Much of the above is confirmed true on starwars.com - Kasdan and Kinberg are writing two standalone Star Wars movies. The lead roles are yet to be announced.
Disney has just announced it is closing down its Austin, Texas based Junction Point Studios gaming company, led by Warren Spector, shortly after the release of Epic Mickey 2.
Disney said the closure is part of its "effort to address the fast-evolving gaming platforms and marketplace" and to align its resources with its key priorities. "We're extremely grateful to Warren Spector and the Junction Point team for their creative contributions to Disney with `Disney Epic Mickey' and `Disney Epic Mickey 2,'" the studio said in a statement.
Disney acquired Junction Point in 2007. The studio was led by "Deus Ex" and "Thief" creator Warren Spector...
"I said to myself as Junction Point embarked on the `Epic Mickey' journey that, worst case, we'd be `a footnote in Disney history,'"
While what Disney does with things that aren't LucasArts is dubious in its relevance to Mix N Mojo, I think we can all see a possible outcome of the LucasFilm acquisition if the shift from AAA titles to casual / mobile isn't successful for LucasArts.
Still, when LucasArts used a line very similar to "the fast-evolving gaming platforms and marketplace" as the rationale behind shutting a project down, it led to the formation of Telltale Games.
There has been some negative reaction to restricting same-gender relationships to one planet. Kotaku has referred to this as "pay-to-gay". They also posted about a response to BioWare's announcement: (Warning: NSFW)The Hunt for the Gay Planet. (Double Warning: May be more fun than The Old Republic, or at least less repetitive)
Hidden in a background shot of the latest Star Wars: Clone Wars episode (season 5, episode 12) as an Easter Egg are these three rather familiar looking posters. This was the 100th episode of the animated show.
(click for high res version)
Thanks to mixnmojo lurker Join the Schwarz for the heads-up. Update:Join the Schwarz says that the Aurebesh text on the posters read "Kowakian Monkey Island", "Full Throttle" and "Day of the Sarlacc".
Some Star Wars Battlefront Online concept art from Slant Six leaked this month. Because canceling Battlefront III wasn't enough, apparently.
News about cut scenes from Return of the Jedi also came out: Three female fighter pilots were dropped from the Battle of Endor.
In Episode VII news, both Samuel L. Jackson and Ewan McGregor said they would both like to come back to reprise their roles as Mace Windu and Obi-Wan Kenobi, respectively. More likely Ian McKellen would take over Obi-Wan just because he seems to play every old wise mentor character nowadays. There was also a leak supposedly revealing plot details about the movie, but this was later proven incorrect.
And for those still playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, there's good news! After a year of being online, EA has a new expansion pack for you to buy called "Rise of the Hutt Cartel". It almost feels reminiscent of Star Wars: Empire at War: Forces of Corruption with its whole "third party vying for control of the galaxy" scheme (except, this time, the Hutts). Those who order before January 7 will get to access it three days early and those who are subscribers will get 50% off the $19.99 price tag.
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.
