The International House of Mojo

Gamespot (US edition) have announced their annual 'best of' game awards. Although shortlisted for the categories of 'Best Story' and 'Best Adventure', Escape from Monkey Island lost out in both to Funcom's The Longest Journey.

See the full awards here.

Source: Adventure Gamer

My good friend emma was good enough to send me this account of a strange happening today:

Whilst watching television today an advert for EuroDisney came on and to my surprise there was Monkey Island music in it, LeChucks theme from EMI, and at the bottom of the screen it said "LucasFilm/Disney". What could this mean?...

Cool huh? Anyone else seen this?

There is a short article posted on Arenagames about the classic SCUMM engine games of LucasArts. Although not going into very much detail, if you don't know much about this gaming era it's a good read.
Read it here

www.starwarskids.com wish all of you a Happy New Year with their.... Starwars dance? click here for a special New Year's treat!

Gamespot UK has awarded EMI "Adventure game of the year 2000" beating out Devil Inside, Blair Witch Vol. 1, and In Cold Blood.

As polished, accomplished and gorgeous to look at as a golden pile of pieces of eight, Escape hoisted the Jolly Roger and confirmed that predictions of the adventure genre's death were entirely premature.

Hooray for Adventures!

Source: p40dixie

Hello, and merry Christmas everybody. Today marks the opening of perhaps the boldest, most daring, most controversial site ever opened. Okay, well, maybe not. But nonetheless, we have officially opened Mixnmojo's new network site known as Adventutre Developer! Here we intend to alert the public to the amateur adventure game scene through reviews, previews and articles. Not only that, but help you, the common websurfer, to make your very own amateur games! Just imagine the possibilities, or better yet, surf on over to Adventure Developer. You wont regret it!

A bit late in the day, but the Unofficial Sam & Max has updated for Christmas with a special front page as well as a new interview with Sam & Max themselves, believed to be previously unpublished for unknown reasons.

On behalf of all the staff at mixnmojo, I would like to wish all of you a very mojo Xmas. Eat lots.. drink lots.. and play EMI !

Mixnmojo is proud to announce its newest site to join the Mojo Network, the revamped Grim Fandango Network. For years GFN has proved to be a great source for Grim Fandango news and information. Now it's back for it's third official re-launch. Here's a clip:

The Grim Fandango Network of today has three major goals in mind. We plan to cover any and all possible Grim Fandango 2 news, revive the GF community, and be the general GF technical support missing online today. If you would like to help out in anyway, please let us know!

One of GFN's hosted sites, Grim Fandango Central also has a new interview up with Grim Fandango's lead programmer Bret Mogilefsky, so be sure to check it out!

For all of you that missed the interview with Carrie Fisher, I will be writing up a complete summary, hopefully before Christmas. If you want any information before then, visit ABC News: Primetime's page for more.

While watching television today, I heard some disturbing news concerning Carrie Fisher, Princess Leia from Star Wars episodes 4, 5, & 6. It seems that Fisher has a chemical imbalance in her brain, causing her to be a manic depressive. She suffers from uncontrollable mood swings, frenzied thoughts, and suffers sleepless nights. For all the American viewers, there will be an article on ABC News: Primetime tonight.

?I have a chemical imbalance that, in its most extreme state, will lead me to a mental hospital,? Carrie Fisher tells Diane Sawyer on ABC News PrimeTime.

It hasn't been a very good past few months for Star Wars fans since Sir Alec Guinness passed away last October.

For more information click here.

LucasArts.com have updated their site. This includes a new contest; the prize, the entire X-Wing game series signed by Mark Hamil. There are also a few new screenshots. Finally, when you go into the site, a holiday message pops up.

Check it out!

EscapeMI.com have announced their end of the year contest. Entrants must battle it out to win one of 3 copies of Grim Fandango.

From now until January 1st, 2001, we are accepting entries for Monkey Island 5 introductions. We want this contest to be a fun way to end Escape from Monkey Island and begin thinking of Monkey Island 5.

Entries must be 200-300 words long and submitted from their page. Head over to EscapeMI.com for more info!

A section that was never remade for this design has been sitting around for a while now, so I've decided to launch what we have of it.
The Companies section of the site will give detailed information on LucasArts, LucasFilm and LucasLearning.
For now half of the LucasArts section is available, but it does contain a comprehensive Games Database.
Many thanks to telarium for his hard work converting the section, and hopefully the other sections will be written shortly.

Still not sure whether you want to buy Escape from Monkey Island or not? Well, I've compiled a list of reviews for ya!
Our own review will be arriving shortly.

- SharkyGames
- Gamers.com
- Gamevisons
- Gamesfirst
- Game Over
- T-break
- PC Gamer UK

There you go. Enjoy!

Regular visitor to #Monkey-Island? Well then, these statistics are for you. Compiled from the logs of Flirbnic's bot, Flibbot, These stats go through everything; from when people visit the channel, to who goes there the most and who talks the least.

See here for the stats!

Interactive Fiction have posted an interesting article on EMI's puzzles. They talk about the evolution of puzzles, where some of EMI's puzzles went wrong, and why the rest were good.

There is more to Escape from Monkey Island than gratuitous references to earlier games in the series or the sight of Guybrush Threepwood in a pirate bathing suit; namely, hard puzzles that are reminiscent of an earlier age in adventure games.

To read the article, head on over to Interactive Fiction

Source: ZeroXcape

Tired of dull polls? Then start voting on ours:

Which member of staff do you think would suddenly be in a lot less pain if one of the pins were removed from the Mojo Voodoo Doll?

Vote here, folks.

While you all await the winners of the EMI contest to be announced, let me take this time to tell you about some projects soon to open at Mixnmojo.

The first is a site dedicated to those of you who develop and create your own adventure games. Adventure Developer will be opening in no time at all and will offer resources, reviews, tutorials, and more to help you with your adventure games developing.

The second is our downloads. Since we moved to this server our downloads have been offline, but hopefully, just before Christmas day we can launch Mojo Downloads. This site will provide a great front end for our download archive, similar in many ways to FilePlanet.com. The archive will be searchable and feature Top 10 and featured downloads.

All this and many more exciting projects to launch soon! Stay tuned!

Escapemi.com sent me some blurb:

"EscapeMI.com would like to announce the first draft of the unoffical story line for Monkey Island 5 has been posted. (Note: this is 100% fan fiction.) If you are interested in seeing a compiled copy of the original forum postings, then check out ACT I. If you are interested in working on the unoffical plot line for ACT II, head over to the forums!

Before you read ACT I, just remember that twenty plus monkey island fans can have an adverse affect on Guybrush. You'll find that the majority of ACT I has Guybrush in various dream worlds.

Many thanks to Guybrush UK for starting this EscapeMI.com project."

It's the end of the day on December 15th and you know what that means. That's right, the Ultimate Insult contest has come to an end and no more submissions will be accepted. Thanks go out to everyone who participated and we'll announce the winners shortly. Best of luck to all.

IGN 64 reports that Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine 64 is out, as well as the game not scheduled to come out till next week, Battle for Naboo, are now available. Check out the article here There'll be a review of Indy there tommorrow there too, so you'll want to take a look if you're interested in it.

Starwars.Com have added two more "On Location With Ahmed Best" (Jar-Jar's voice) There are now twenty videos in total. Starwars.com has also pulled out their christmas decorations, but their decorations are no where near as spiffy as ours. (Good job, Jake!)

Lucasart's Website has been updated with a new Product Spotlight of X-Wing Trilogy, and a new Ask The Team about Star Wars Demolition, which I also suggest you buy/rent a copy of at your nearest convienience.

Well, we've broken out the Xmas snow to make our page look all festive (thanks Jake!) There is even a sweet Snowman at the bottom of the page.. awwwwww!
So start rejoicing as Xmas is here, and have a very Mojo Xmas from us all!

You only have a days worth of hours before entries for the Insult contest are no longer accepted!
Go submit those insults to win a copy of EMI signed by the project leaders!

IGN reports that Indiana Jones is coming to Game Boy color sometime soon. Take a look at this article if you're interested.

The Videogame Wallpaper Page, in addition to the Lucasarts Icons and such they already have, have added some Icons from everyone's favorite game, Monkey Island. They're actually pretty good too.

Our almost sister site, JediNights have posted an article entitled The Big Dissapointment. As you may be able to tell, it is a rant about the cancellation of Obi-Wan.

"The last couple of years they've released some ok games, but nothing that everybody had to have. In my opinion, Lucasarts Entertainment Company has turned into a big disappointment"

You can read the article and many others over at JediNights

Mike Stemmle and Sean Clark, project leaders on Escape from Monkey Island, have been interviewed by The Clearly Unofficial EFMI Site. This time they discuss their work on EMI, fan reactions, and the future. Here's a snippet:

What we thought would be the hardest problem was getting the look of the game right. It had to be somewhat consistent with the 2D Monkeys, and yet evolve to take advantage of 3D. The art team did such a great job with this, it truly was painless for us. It just happened. That being said, they did put in a lot of effort, and we tried several approaches, but their instincts and abilities made the impossible easy.

Click here for the full interview! (Yes, there is a spoiler or two.)

Woah! Bluesnews, has redesigned after many thousands of years of looking really horrible, but with a nice logo.
It now looks rather nice with a slighty smaller nice logo! Woo.
Did i mention that its still roughly the same colours? which is good - I can't cope with too much change at once!

Ok, the server died last week, and was rebuilt, and because of that a setting which was apparently there before but ddint work now works.
If you have an @mixnmojo.com account you'll need this info:
In order to be able to send mail aswell as receive it, you'll need to select "Allow Authorization for Sending Mail" and enter your login in the Settings box in Outlook
I'm sure its similar for any others email proggies. Any questions? mail me

Ben Whatsisname, Webmaster of The Kickstand and master of many other Mojo projects, has some great news:
His Daughter, here-by nickmamed baby_Whatsername was born at 1:11am on 12/11/00, wieghing 6 lbs, 6 ounces and 18 inches long.

Instead of crying, she looked at me and cried "I wanna be a pirate!" That's my baby!

Excellent news, Congratulations to Ben and Mrs Ben.
A feature on the kickstand will be up as soon as Irecover the needed files from a deadened hard drive.

As if the other 50 EMI contests weren't enough, Gamespot UK is giving away 5 copies of Escape From Monkey Island. The contest is here . Good luck.

GameSpot has interviewed ex-LEC'er Tim Schafer, asking questions about his new game production company "Double Fine," and of course his next game (for those of you who are reading this and don't know who Tim Schafer is (shame on you), he was the project lead for Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango). Unfortunately the publisher of this upcoming console game hasn't announced it yet so Tim's answers are rather vague, but it's still worth reading to see what he's been up to since he left LucasArts.

Insult submissions to the Ultimate Insult Contest end on December 15, which is just a week away! If you haven't entered yet you're not only missing out on the chance to go down in history as a hilarious fellow, but also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to win FABulous PRIzes like copies of EMI autoographed by Mike Stemmle and Sean Clark and other prizes we may or may not have thought up yet!

How do you enter? Go to the Ultimate Insult Contest page, think of an ingenius insult, equally clever comeback, and the game you'd be playing while delivering it and you're eligible to win. All entries will be judged by Mixnmojo staff and EMI project leaders Mike Stemmle and Sean Clark.

Already entered one insult? Enter more, you're not limited to just one! Never seen this site before in your life? Then sign up for a My.Mixnmojo account, then fire away!

Looking at a Next Generation Magazine at the grocery store, I saw it had a small bit on Tim Schafer's new company. His studio is Double Fine Productions and consists of six former LucasArts employees. Their goal is to release an adventure game for a console by 2002.

For news on the project as it comes, you can look at their
website. No Details are availible yet, but stay tuned. Also see the Adventuregamer story.

Source: Next Generation

Not only have our affiliates, Jedi Nights.com had a cool new redesign, but they've got some great news going on. Including their latest interview. This one is with, prominent editor and owner of the Massassi Temple, which is a coool site.

This is the Spanish translation of mercatfat's eariler post about a Spanish MI walkthrough...

Para los altavoces espa?oles, hay un walkthrough espa?ol de la EMI en la Monkey Island Argentina, un fansite espa?ol del mono del MI.

Ok folks the time has come, we NEED new advertisers. Flycast suck! we need a decent agency, affiliate, or someone who wants to sell advertising for us. If you know anything or can help, please email me. Thanks.

For all you people that can only read Spainish (If so, how can you read this? Err, anyway), there's a Spainish EMI walkthrough at Monkey Island Argentina, a spanish MI fansite.

*WARNING!* Contains Spoilers!

Source: Adventure Gamer

Well, hi everyone. I'm mercatfat, your new news updater. I'm also working on some things for Mojo, such as walkthroughs, game guides, and a couple other projects that'll be unveiled in time.

It's a real pleasure to work for a fine website like this. If you wish to contact me, my email is mercatfat@mixnmojo.com,
and my ICQ is 99679623.

Have a great day, everyone! :)

Computer gaming site The Outer Edge has posted their review of EMI. This review differs from many of the EMI reviews we've seen because the reviewer didn't play the first three games. Don't let that make you rule it out as a worthless read, though. It really makes it pretty interesting, as he concentrates more on how it worked as a free standing game than how well it stacked up against others in the series. Go take a look. Disagree? Leave a comment!

Oh yeah: I suppose it's rather assumed at this point, but the review's screenshots are pretty spoiler-rich (but you don't have to look at them if you don't want to).

For all those interested in playing the massive online starwars game "Star Wars Galaxies" in the future might want to check out the new page for registering your handle (nickname). It ensures some up-and-comer doesnt steal your name from under you! not only do you get to reserve your handle but you can;

* post to the Star Wars Galaxies message boards
* join an exclusive mailing list
* participate in polls on this site
* apply as a beta tester for the game.

Don't delay, register today!

Marek at Adventure Gamer has started another EMI petition. Yes yes yet another petition, but this one is making a decent, realistic request: asking LucasArts to port EMI to a popular console system. With LucasArts' current strong comittment to next-generation consoles an EMI console port seems very likely.

A report has just come in that Simon Jeffery, President of LucasArts, was featured on Sky TV's channel, ".tv." The program, named Blue Chip, interviewed Simon about Star Wars, EMI and various console issues. The Interview may possibly be featured on the channels homepage. Something odd was that they dubbed Bombad racing ''One of the reasons to buy a PS2," saying that the PS2's broadband Internet access would allow you to have big Bombad races, but in our recent interview Michael McCormick said that game had no internet play option... hmmmmm, oh well!

The MI Monkey Center has put up a feature titled "The 10 Best Monkey Island Sites." It takes a look, not suprisingly, at what they consider the top 10 Monkey Island sites, providing a brief description of each as well as a "what's good" and "what's not so good" about each site. A good introduction to some of the lesser known, but worthwhile, Monkey Island sites, as well as some "old favorites." Take a look.

Sorry we didn't catch this earlier (its on our own site!), but the adventure game creating tool RoBOT has been updated to Alpha 3, which is available along with the source and additional resources at the RoBOT site. Some notable features are fixed save/load, MP3 support, and the ability to play up to 10 simultaneous sound files.

So you entered the LucasArts EMI contest and didn't win. Or even worse, you weren't eligible to enter since you live outside the United States. If that's the case, we've got some good news. Mixnmojo in collaboration with LucasArts is pleased to announce our own contest where 10, count them 10 copies of Escape From Monkey Island signed by Mike Stemmle and Sean Clark are being awarded as prizes.

But wait, you ask, what's the contest? It's quite simple, you have to come up with the Ultimate Insult. Send us your best insult filled with piratey wit a la Monkey Island. Check out the rules and regulations and send in your insults here, and good luck!

Adventure Gamer has posted the first of two reviews of Escape from Monkey Island. The first review, by Peter Silk, gives EMI 4 out of 5 stars. Here's the summary of his review:

Pros: Good story, GREAT visuals and sound, some of the finest puzzles i've played.
Cons: Story may irritate some purists, EVIL bugs, some control glitches.