The International House of Mojo

Theforce.net is reporting that the latest UK PC Zone magazine has Star Wars: Empire at War (the new RTS developed by much of the old Command & Conquer team at Pteroglyph Games) as the cover story. Readers are reporting "This new PC game is set two years before ANH with a certain amount of cross over from Episode 3. It appears to include ground battles set in desert and greenland areas with attacking AT-AT's and a new Imperial ground based vehicle called "TIE Crawlers"... The action also takes place in space with rebel fleets taking on Star Destroyers".

By the looks of the magazine scan, it's scheduled for an Autumn 05 release.

Source: Theforce.net

As recently pointed out in the Mojo forums by woodenstool, LucasArts have put online a gaming survey which concentrates on Indiana Jones gaming in the latter half. If you're an Indy fan, or just have some opinions to share on The Emperor's Tomb you might like to take the survey yourself.

Source: Mojo Forums

Just in time for Christmas, the ScummVM team has put out a new version of their popular utility which allows many classic adventures to work on modern systems. The new ScummVM (version 0.7.0) is available for download here - just grab the ScummVM edition for your system of choice from the "release binaries" section.

New in this version is preliminary support for 26 kids point and click adventures from Humongous Entertainment (Putt Putt, Pajama Sam, etc, many of which were created by Ron Gilbert and written by Dave Grossman), smooth background scrolling for Full Throttle, The Dig, and Curse of Monkey Island, broader audio compression support, and native support for Mac LucasArts games (in past versions Mac users had to run a converter utility before playing, now the games work right off the original disc).

If that isn't enough news, the ScummVM team is also pleased to announce that they're giving their website a long-awaited makeover, now that the winner of their website design contest has been decided.

For more information on ScummVM, as well as free (legal!) downloadable copies of classic adventures Beneath a Steel Sky and Flight of the Amazon Queen, visit ScummVM.org.

Bad Brain Entertainment, the company who is financing and publishing Autumn Moon's A Vampyre Story, has just put up their website, indicating a 2nd Quarter '06 release for "Vampyre".

Autumn Moon is made up of ex-LucasArts talent, and is run by Bill Tiller. There are also strong indicators that Bad Brain is trying to aquire LucasArts unfinished Sam & Max 2 code.

Bad Brain also have a couple of internally produced adventure games in the works, the promising & hilarious sounding The Orgastic Four and an intriguing multi-player adventure, the X-Filesesque I-JET.

To learn more, check out their site; bad-brain.com

Source: Bad Brain Entertainment

While it's inevitible that Dank the Caveman who peers down from the Telltale site and who featured on the screen in a recent Marin Independent Journal Telltale piece will be in a game sooner or later, there may well be a new kid on the block who could be appearing in Telltale's first original adventure game (Telltale Games is made up predominantly from staffers laid off at LucasArts who were working on the much anticipated Sam & Max sequel).

Not so long ago on the Telltale forums "apignarb" tipped the world off about the "surfy" site; dudebrough.com. In it "Blades of Stenchtar II" is reviewed (those who read the telltale blogs will be familiar).

The site is a "home-made" webpage by surfer dude Ted Dudebrough. And a whois lookup puts it all beyond doubt. Gnarly!

Source: Telltale Games Forums