The International House of Mojo

Just your friendly Mojo PSA that pre-orders for the various physical editions of Sam & Max Save the World on offer from Limited Run Games close tomorrow, Sunday, May 30th at midnight. A quick reminder of the various products you can redirect your child’s tuition budget toward if you act now:

• Sam & Max Save the World (Switch): $34.99
• Sam & Max Save the World (Switch) Collector’s Edition: $74.99
• Sam & Max Save the World (PC) Collector’s Edition: $64.99
• Sam & Max Switch Slipcover: $4.99
• And here’s one I’m just noticing: a Limited Run Games logo T-shirt designed after the Sam & Max logo. That’s the kind of shamelessness we can respect.

As that slipcover implies, you’ll certainly be dealing with similar financial crises when Skunkape delivers their remasters of the remaining two seasons in due time.

In other Limited Run news, it seems that Monkey Island collector’s box has quietly been pushed from a Q2 to a Q4 ship date. Hey, getting Guybrush’s hair right is fastidious work.

Source: Limited Run Games

Look, I don’t care what you say – the Amiga versions of The Secret of Monkey Island and LeChuck’s Revenge are the only Monkey Island-s you need. And now you can play them through the streaming service Antstream Arcade. What is Antstream Arcade? I have no clue, but it exists, and it has the Amiga versions of Monkey Island. The service is available for Windows, Mac, Android, Linux, Amazon Fire, and Nvidia Shield.

You can try the Antstream for free; after that, it’s £9.99 a month. I could not find any dollar or euro prices.

(Some might also argue UAE is a better alternative, but I’ll leave that up to the individual.)

Double Fine has delivered another seasonal update for Psychonauts 2, a game that began pre-production sometime during the Coolidge Administration. Enjoy below the studio's unflinching Spring 2021 progress report, complete with voyeuristic peeks at the team's Zoom meetings, tantalizing new gameplay footage, and an exciting glimpse at the music recording sessions featuring not only Peter McConnell, but his brothers-in-arms Michael Land and Clint Bajakian.

Oh, and Tim draws parallels between the sequel and Monkey Island 2, showing that he still knows how to push Mojo's buttons.

Beyond that, Psychonauts 2 has also landed the cover story of the latest issue of Game Informer. Digital and...linear?...versions of the magazine can be purchased right here. And do check out this accompanying video showing off one of Raz's new Psi-powers:

The Game Informer preview is apparently the vanguard of an outright assault of incoming Psychonauts 2 coverage, so keep an eye out for that. Amdist it all will be a developer playthrough of the original Psychonauts - now available on Xbox Game Pass - streaming via the Double Fine Twitch channel over the next several Fridays.

And is there even time to mention the open pre-orders for Double Fine's 20th anniversary art book, or the Amnesia Fortnight movie, the trailer for which is below?

Probably not. I mean, I have to stop somewhere.

Update from Thrik: No, it doesn’t stop there! Double Fine has released a video about the game’s accessibility features, which seem to be very extensive — for my part, more so than I’ve ever seen in a game.

Following IGN, Kotaku, and Gamespot, Mixnmojo is making an appeal to anyone reading this to consider donating blood to Palestinian humanitarian groups or money to the following charities.

This is not a political post. It is an exceptional humanitarian appeal. Palestinian resistance to an ethnic cleansing campaign to “forcibly remove” them from their homes in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood escalated to mobs of Israeli settlers chanting “Death to Arabs” through the city and, now, to Israeli Air Force missiles bombing Gaza.

It is impossible to watch the situation on the ground and not want to help. Please watch that video.

Yesterday, Israel destroyed the Associated Press and Al Jazeera offices in the city. Entire families are killed. Images of children or children with thousand-yard stares cleaning bloody floors fill Arab media outlets, even as Facebook and Twitter independently claim that “glitches” have prevented posts on the situation spreading on their social media platforms.

Israel has been supported in this by the US and UK. As such, we urge anyone reading this to call their democratic representatives and ask them to pressure Israel to end its campaigns in Gaza and Jerusalem, even if they think it’s pointless. You can find your representatives here: The USA, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

The following charities are apolitical and do humanitarian work in a place that badly needs it:

• Medical Aid for Palestinians

• The Palestine Children’s Relief Fund

• Middle East Children’s Alliance

• Anera

• Palestine Appeal 2021

• Global Giving’s Gaza Emergency Relief Fund

Mojo will resume its dog and bunny adventure game coverage after this.

As long as we're on the subject of Laserschwert, did you know that he recently gave his frame-ready poster download of the Monkey Island 2 cover art a material upgrade? You better give your eyeballs a head-up on this one.

You see, a 1991 issue of the UK-based magazine "The One" contained a large, fold-out poster of Purcell's artwork, making it a superior scanning source to the box, or for that matter anything else known to exist. A generous fan in possession of that particular issue heard the call of duty and sent the precious reference material to the pre-eminent authority in this field, who then worked his arts:

Read more and collect your upgrade in Laserschwert's stickied poster thread, where the latest version of his offerings can always be found.

Boy, it's almost like reading the forums is a good idea or something.

Source: The Forums

Well, I didn't know about all that. Luckily, Laserschwert was able to https://forums.mixnmojo.com/topic/200381-zombies-ate-my-neighbors-2/?do=findComment&comment=2788753

]steer me to the following tweet when I showcased my ignorance on the forums, thereby putting me In The Know™.[/p]

Now that's putting your license with Lucasfilm to good use. We'll just have to contain ourselves until all is divulged in June. In the meantime: woot.

Source: Twitter

Per Deadline:

Mangold's looting his own Logan cast, I see. And why not?

Source: Deadline

At least, that’s the impression Mads Mikkelsen is under. Here’s the relevant portion from the actor’s interview with Esquire.

Rehearsing? Amateurs! In any event, the untitled fifth installment will hit theaters July 2022, while a single screenshot from its German fan game adaptation in pseudo-SCUMM will drop thirteen years after that before the project is unceremoniously abandoned. And Mojo will be here to guide you through both, unless Zaarin misses a payment.

Source: Esquire

If you’re a Switch owner and for whatever reason have not purchased the scourge of the Proud Boys, Sam & Max Save the World, you can now download a demo of it: North American store or European store. And after you’ve decided you love it, you can get it for 20% off from the Nintendo eShop – sale runs through May 31st.

As an extra bonus, the social justice warriors over at Skunkape have also posted a screenshot from the second season. I mean, what?!

And that's awesome.

More, please.

Update: Oh nice, there's a trailer, too, revealing extra features that include a behind-the-scenes gallery.

Source: Nintendo Life

I’ve been told anecdotally that there are a number of public Discord channels where Mixnmojo readership types congregate and make predominately harmless mischief together. Being that I’m in my late eighties, I don’t keep up with such things myself and instead rely upon a few well-placed sources to funnel back the highlights to the nursing home I occupy.

All this is to explain Mojo’s palsied reaction to a rather stunning turn of events: Skunkape’s Randy Tudor, who served as a gameplay programmer both on Sam & Max: Freelance Police as well as the Telltale seasons, offered up without comment [that I know of] the following from his personal archive to the community of a Sam & Max Discord:

That would of course be Freelance Police project lead Mike Stemmle on the receiving end of Max’s ire. All signs point to this being produced during that cancelled game’s development -- perhaps as part of some web-based marketing that didn’t see the light of day, or maybe it’s just some internal nonsense the team made to amuse themselves?

We may never know, but like all untimely Freelance Police flotsam that makes it to the shoreline, it’s getting gracelessly stuffed into our big fat article where all extant media related to that martyred sequel shall collect like barnacles until the end of the internet.

While the specific date remains unannounced, next month will see the release of Sam & Max: This Time It’s Virtual on its debut platform, the Oculus Quest. Mojo hopes to contribute to the hype by following up its HappyGiant interview with another journalistic tour-de-force (stay tuned!), but if you’re more of a materialistic personality who’s into free stuff, you may want to look into this contest HappyGiant has just launched.

The way it works is you volunteer information that people on the internet shouldn’t be giving out, thus entering for a chance to win a pair of those excellent Boss Fight Studio figures you’ve heard so much about. HappyGiant promises that this is the first of multiple contests, so keep an eye out for more giveaways after you try your luck with this one.

Source: HappyGiant

You might think the fact that the founder of Mixnmojo works for Double Fine would mean we spend our days backstroking across a comprehensive ocean of exclusives, or can at least be relied upon for up-to-the-second Psychonauts 2 coverage, but such expectations would make you: an idiot, apparently.

Instead, we’re left to scratch around for others' leftovers like a bunch of grubby parasites while our absent father figure returns the affections of other people’s children. But if I could return to my point: Double Fine released some new Psychonauts 2 screen this week, which you can check out below.

While we were at it, we took the liberty of righting our woefully out of date screenshot gallery, so do give that a browse, too.

Need more? Well, how about this new interview with Tim which touts the sequel’s empathetic approach toward mental illness, including consulting with a doctor of clinical psychology? These efforts sure sound like something that sounds good, though I’m equally concerned that the franchise lives up to its orphanage-pancaking heritage.

Speaking of: Should any Xbox owners be itching to give the original Psychonauts a fresh spin as its long-gestating follow-up looms ever closer, they'll note that the game is coming to Xbox Game Pass. A nifty new trailer was created to mark the occasion:

Indiana Jones 5 co-star Mads Mikkelsen has strong opinions about the script he read before signing onto the project, going so far as to tell Collider that it was “everything I wished it to be.”

Mads is excited. Now you’re excited. And most importantly, you know who to blame if this turns out to be one of those rare fifth installments that falls short of redefining the potential of the medium. The guy’s just implicitly accepted all responsibility for your expectations. Start getting pissed off now.

Source: Collider

We've learned that LucasArts games tester Judith Lucero has passed away. Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert shared some thoughts on her importance at his blog.

Although she isn't in the opening credits to Monkey Island 2, Gilbert's post proves she did work on it. Her name appears in the opening to The Secret of Monkey Island, and her list of credits speaks for itself.

Mixnmojo gives its condolences to her family and loved ones.