Like Telltale and Kevin Bruner's career, the Fact of the Moment is yesterday's news. Until Zaarin and/or Remi resurrects it, anyway. If they resurrect it. Not sure how crazy we are about resurrection. I'm sure we've all read Pet Sematary.
The damn thing was updated once every four months, anyway. But I was updating it once every two weeks at the end, there. Did you notice?
Over the years, a number of Mojo’s articles have been casualties of various badly handled transitions (like the one you’re enjoying now), leaving them only partially accessible via frustrating trips to The Wayback Machine. This isn’t a handful of features we’re talking about here – well over fifty percent of Mojo’s celebrated, and now twenty year strong, body of work evaporated over time, including some of the site’s best material, like the entirety of its E3 2002 coverage (including Sarah’s infamously unsporting preview of Gladius), Cooking with Spaff, and a trove of valuable interviews.
(The years also spawned some content we’re less proud of, like that pompous Sam & Max: Season 1 uber-review that concluded with The Tingler collating a didactic list of dubiously reasoned flaws for Telltale to address (Posing the breathless question: “You want a perfect 5 review Telltale?”) that piqued Chuck Jordan; that description-defying Christmas 2008 Contest Results article that Gabez punished us with; also, everything I’ve ever written – but we’re not gonna go all George Lucas on our history by gouging out the less flattering parts. We can’t learn from Vietnam if we whitewash it.)
Despite valiant efforts undertaken by just about every staffer at some point, the restoration of Mojo's body of work has been one of the modern world's most intractable problems due to tons of lost media and irreproducible formatting. The process of dragging those old HTML features into the world of BBCode is a torturous one, particularly given the creative use of mark-up Gabez seemed intent on making the staple of his articles, leaving them about as easy to translate as coffee-stained Sanskrit ciphered into reverse Wingdings. Not to speak ill of the dead.
What we did in the end as an alternative to ritual suicide was preserve at least the text of all missing articles. Where we could, we went beyond that. The individual results of anguished, nonstop compromise range from borderline pointless (like an article exploring various versions of the Gold Guy logo that doesn’t actually contain images of the Gold Guy logo), to hard-won success stories made possible by the discovery of virus-laden FTP backups.
What you’ll discover quickly is that the work is still very much ongoing, but given that every article sitewide is knackered to various degrees right now thanks to formatting bugs MojoEx introduced, we figured there was little point in holding back what we have. Their actual condition aside, we do believe every article is accounted for, and do let us know otherwise. To the extent that they can be improved, it'll just have to happen on the same time table as everything else in this dump.
So what are you waiting for? Click around the Features section and reacquaint yourselves with old classics and embarrassments. If you’re anything like me, you’ll have forgotten that half this stuff was ever published. And who knows? Maybe that Mojo CD Jake supposedly has buried in his closet is more than an old legend, and we can get everything looking as it actually should. But don’t count on it.
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.
Mark Ferrari, one of the most important LucasArts artists during the early SCUMM era, has relaunched his web site, and you have reason to be exited - I particularly want to draw your attention to the Image Archives section, where Mark is hosting rare samples from his older work. JP has already been fomenting an irresponsible tizzy on Twitter (but not here, for some reason ¬) by suggesting that some of the screens may belong to an unreleased Star Wars adventure game.
So check out Mark's new site, which he promises is merely a work-in-progress. And unlike Mojo, it may actually graduate from that status at some point.
Source: Mark Ferrari
This had been acknowledged on Twitter during the downtime, but I figured the passing of British actor W. Morgan Sheppard merited front page mourning. The Mojo faithful will recognize him as the voice of Guybrush Threepwood's loyal if reckless navigator Ignatius Cheese, who is additionally revealed to be the owner of The SCUMM Bar*, in Escape from Monkey Island. He was also that one guy from The Prestige, among about a thousand other roles. Sheppard was 86.
*In fact, I considered titling this "Owner of The SCUMM Bar dies", but that seemed in poor taste given that people might have interpreted that as being Remi, and why get people's hopes up?
Source: Deadline
OK, so that server update took a bit more than what we expected—what are a few weeks among friends?—but Zaarin got it back and running. More or less. If something doesn't work, well, then that's how it'll be for now.
And, hey, MojoEX has finally gone live, in all its Alpha glory. This first phase is known as "Works Kinda OK On Your Phone." Enjoy! Or don't. Mojo loves you all the same!