The GOG.com winter sale is in full swing, and features new, one-day only discounts daily. And lo, so it came to pass that on this December 27th, 2018, Thimbleweed Park featured a whopping 55% discount.
Personally, I have never seen Thimbleweed Park on sale, so now's a chance to buy the latest from that one guy that made one game about the monkeys. Mojo reviewed Thimbleweed Park and Remi liked it.
Source: GOG
It's no secret that The Wolf Among Us likely ranks as Mojo's favorite post Rodkin-era Telltale game, and the sequel was reservedly anticipated around these parts. Then, of course, Telltale did what it did, and here we are, Wolf-less, which might not be a bad thing if Eurogamer is anything to go by:
The Wolf Among Us' second season was one such casualty of Telltale's closure. The sequel to the critically-acclaimed adaptation of Bill Willingham's Fables series, Wolf Among Us 2 barely got started, so small and lacking in budget was the team working on it. "[The budget was] shoe-string, even by Telltale standards," said an ex-staff member. "Everybody knew Wolf 1 was a critical success, but not a commercial hit. I think people came into it realising they were making a boutique product. At one point the season was going to be three episodes."
Well, then . . . Another little tidbit:
"If something like The Walking Dead: Season Two did a fraction of sales of the first season, and the Michonne mini-series tanked, what made people think Season Three, let alone Season Four, was a good idea? After The Walking Dead: Season One, very few people from creative had any say about what projects the studio took on."
The hits just keep on coming.
Source: Eurogamer
The Fan Game - Back to the Future Part III: Timeline of Monkey Island they call it, and it looks right about as wacky as it sounds.
From what I understand, you follow Marty back to the times of Monkey Island in an alternate timeline from the original games. I mean, of course it’s alternate; that’s the effect of time travel. Anything else would be crazy.
A demo and all is apparently available: More on Twitter
(Thanks to Benzo for the original heads up on this.)
Some good news from the implosion of Telltale:
Former lead writer on The Walking Dead: The Final Season Mary Kenney is now at Insomniac Games, which recently returned to the spotlight after a successful Spider-Man game. She shared no details on what she's been working on.
Before The Final Season, Kenney worked on Batman: The Enemy Within, which Remi liked a whole lot more than he did the original series.
You can check-out some of her writing here. Prior to Telltale, Kenney created her own games and worked as a journalist, publishing articles in outlets like The New York Times.
Good luck to her from Mixnmojo—especially on not having too many severance-free sleepless nights at Insomniac. (Listen, if SNL can get away with making the same joke over and over again on one of their sketches, I can get away with making the same joke twice in a news story.)
Source: GamesIndustry.biz
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.
The fossilized LucasArts Fan Network was Mojo’s home and hearth for many a mutually productive year, but awhile back the grown-ups in charge decided we needed to break away from our notoriously unstable guardian for greener, Patreon-financed pastures in keeping with Zaarin’s newly inaugurated article of faith: If Mojo’s is going to go down, it will be by its own doing.
To this day the LFN domain can be seen to flicker off and on, and right now we’re in one of those “on” times, presumably because somebody’s credit card got auto-charged. While many of the sites LFN hosted were long dead anyway, a number of beloved destinations are temporarily available again due to the oversight, and it might be worth revisiting sites like IndyJones.net while you can.
And just so you know, LFN: It wasn’t you; it was us. :~
Source: LFN
After being available on Amazon Prime for a while, it seems that the four Indiana Jones movies will be switching to Netflix as their exclusive streaming home beginning in January. We report this because we’re all about Lucasfilm. With the obvious exception of anything Lucasfilm has been doing since 1989.
So if you don’t own this classic film series on eight different home video formats already, perhaps this will serve as a handy excuse for some of you to enjoy Indy’s cinematic adventures for the umpteenth time while you await Indiana Jones 5, due out July 9, 2021. Upon hearing that release date, 86-year-old composer John Williams was overheard to declare: “lol”.
Source: Collider
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.
In honor of Willow’s 30th anniversary, I sportingly elected to use it as a cudgel to beat on other movies with. Check out my new rant that decries the way movies look nowadays, using Willow as a tortuously coerced polestar in a desperate attempt to be able to market the piece as Mojo-relevant.
Thanks to Remi for the header
Way back in 2013, the Lucasfilm classic Willow finally debuted on Blu-ray to sales that dwarfed every Star Wars release combined. About eleven seconds later, it fell out of print, having vanished as surely as a pig beneath an apprentice sorcerer's cloth.
The reasons why remain murky. The release roughly coincided with the acquisition of Lucasfilm by Disney, so perhaps there were prosaic legal complications. At any rate, the title became a favorite of eBay scalpers, commonly selling for over a hundred smackers on the second hand marketplace only a year after it came out. The situation was sad, bleak, hopeless. We measure the lives lost by the cemetery.
Now, for the movie's 30th anniversary, it looks like this grievance is getting addressed. Pre-order listings for a reissue have begun to spring up on various online retailers. The implication is that you will be able to obtain Willow by disc or by stream for a reasonable price on January 29th, 2019.
And that, handsome gentlemen, is the kind of news we at Mojo proudly risk our lives to bring you.
Source: Blu-ray.com forums
With all the time spent complaining about Star Wars games circa 1999-20wheneverpeoplestoppedcaring, I gotta ask: what happened?
Maybe it's because LucasArts, like Telltale, the Telltale Tool, and Kevin Bruner's career, is dead. Maybe it's because Simon Jeffery and Jim Ward live on that yacht upstate somewhere where all former LucasArts CEOs go, and they can't tell Kathleen Kennedy to start cashing in. Or maybe Star Wars games have finally faced their "marketplace realities" and have taken a Han Solo-like tumble into the abyss.
All I know is that we live in a world with four Star Wars movies in as many years and one LEGO game to show for it. The bitter part of me that wanted all lost adventure games is gleeful. The other part is wondering how on earth the people who wanted Star Wars to be "adult" so badly they wished that edgy snoozefest Rogue One into existence aren't clamoring for Rogue One: Fortnite. Also, do none of these people want Super Smash Disney Brawl? Thanos vs. Vader, people. Captain America vs. Wreck-It Ralph. It's at least as entertaining as those Avengers movies and probably at least as good-looking as Civil War. Honestly, I'm just spitballing here. Something something media franchise potential.
Anyway, play Kathy Rain. It's great. Primordia and Gemini Rue are great, too.
Source: Wikipedia
I don't know when it happened, but the music from Jerry Logas and the Pier 23 Reunion Band, which comprised the soundtrack to Telltale Texas Hold'em, is now available to hear and buy at Bandcamp.
Jerry Logas is the father of former Telltale designer Heather Logas. The Telltale team used his music in their first game, which was released in 2005, the year after they first were founded. Back then, they had a team about the size of the Skybound Games-employed crew that are working from the Telltale offices on The Walking Dead: The Final Season right now. But, of course, the company was much less dead back then.
Watch-out for a VO from an old (un)dead friend.
On the one hand, The Walking Dead is, at least, the final Telltale game, as opposed to that bizarre adaptation of Minecraft: Story Mode for Netflix; considering the impact the first season had on the
company's trajectory, this is appropriate. (There's a joke here somewhere about it being the final nail in Telltale's coffin.) On the other, considering how The Walking Dead ends everything it touches, we best start making funeral preparations for Skybound Games.
Source: Skybound Games
Psychonauts 2 is scheduled for 2019 and will come to PS4, Xbox One, PC, Mac, and Linux.
The game's Fig campaign is still open, if you want to pitch in.
I'd forgotten how funny the Ford Cruller reveal was in the original, including that dumb joke about bacon. Also, I'd somehow never noticed that his appearance seems to be based on Kurt Vonnegut. Is that just me? Things to muse on as you take the opportunity to revisit Peter McConnell's beautiful Psychonauts soundtrack. I've never been out in a cabin without having "Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp" in my head.
Alternatively, revisit the work of Scott C., who was largely responsible for the look of the original game. His art's harder to emulate than it looks, I've come to learn.
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!