The International House of Mojo

Double Fine acquired the full rights to Costume Quest and Stacking from Nordic Games, who previously acquired the distribution rights after THQ declared bankruptcy earlier this year.

Because Double Fine now owns the properties outright, they have decided to make retail releases of Stacking, Costume Quest, and Psychonauts for Windows and Mac. The releases will be published by former rights holder (of Stacking and Costume Quest), Nordic Games. This will mark the first time Costume Quest and Stacking has been available at retail, as they were previously only available through digital distribution.

In other Double Fine news, another one of the excellent Double Fine Comics has received the book treatment, as Mark Hamer's Snapshots (formerly known as Polaroids) is now available in softcover or hardcover format from the Double Fine store. Both versions contain a foreword by Tim Schafer and an introduction by Scott Campbell.

To celebrate, Double Fine is holding a contest to give away five signed copies of the book to five people who make the best caption for the five uncaptioned snapshots posted here. You have until Wednesday, December 4, 2013 at 11:59pm Pacific time to enter, so if you think you can come up with some clever captions, be sure to enter for your chance to win.

Additionally, fans of Double Fine's Amnesia Fortnight two week game prototype developing sessions will be happy to know that Tim Schafer recently posted on Twitter that the next Amnesia Fortnight session will be occurring around February of next year.

To wrap this post up, one more bit of Double Fine related news. former Double Fine intern Marius "Majus" Winter has been making a game each month this year with Benedikt Hummel at Major Bueno. To celebrate a year of games, they are making Major Bueno Party and they are enlisting the help of everyone. For a few more hours (until November is over) Until December 3rd, you can submit a character to be part of the game, and have your character appear with those made by such artists as Broken Age lead artist, and creator of My Comic About Me, Nathan "Bagel" Stapley, former Double Fine art director, and creator of Double Fine Action Comics, Scott Campbell, and former LucasArts and Telltale lead artist, and the creator of Grickle, Graham Annable. So, don't be shy, and submit a character now. I've submitted about a half a dozen myself.

Source: Double Fine Action News

If you have an Xbox Live Gold subscription, you can now get Double Fine's Iron Brigade for free, as it is the latest in Xbox's Games With Gold service which offers 2 free games each month for Xbox Live Gold subscribers to download and keep.

Source: GameTrailers

Autonomous, the Lee Petty designed retro-futuristic sandbox robot game that appeared in Amnesia Fortnight 2012, has now been adapted and expanded for Windows, exclusively for the Leap Motion controller.

This new version of the game has many changes over its Amnesia Fortnight 2012 predecessor. In addition to the motion control, the game now has:

multiple levels! Once the player has met the energy goal for the current level, they must battle their way to a transmission center where they are teleported to new levels—each with a distinct look and procedurally placed robot parts, automatons and energy sources.

Sky Map: A holographic map of the level is projected into the sky, allowing the player to quickly find energy sources, friendly and enemy automatons and other important structures.

Hunter-Killstar: The player’s presence no longer goes undetected. Automatons known as HUNTER-KILLSTARS are periodically transmitted into the world, designed specifically to hunt down and destroy the player. As time ticks on and the levels progress avoiding and defeating them becomes more and more challenging.

It's available now for free for Windows for the Leap Motion controller.

Source: Double Fine Action News

We had this ugly habit for awhile of flogging tenuously relevant Kickstarters here on the front page in a desperate attempt to defraud you into believing we had actual news to report on lean days. Well, here's a slow news day and two peripherally relevant Kickstarters to spare a thought.

The first campaign is for Bad Dreams: Volume 1, a physical compilation of a web comic that was released earlier this year. "An illustrated fantasy adventure," this bound volume would cover the first five issues. Oh, and the artist is none other than Gary Winnick, LucasArts employee from ye olden days, and Ron Gilbert's co-pilot on Maniac Mansion.

The second Kickstarter is headed by up two latter-day LucasArts designers who were toiling away on Star Wars: 1313 and Star Wars: First Assault up to the studio's quite timely closure. Relating that it was nearly impossible to pitch an original title to LEC management in their combined sixteen years at the company (shocker), they were inspired to make Super Roman Conquest, a sidescroller with strategy elements. For Caesar!

Thanks to former staffer Chris Capel aka The Tingler for the heads up on the second one. I guess Gabez deactivated his authorization badge.

Paul Shapera, the composer of the upcoming free two part adventure game for iOS designed by Autumn Moon's founder Bill Tiller and Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island co-writer Gene Mocsy, has made an interesting blog post detailing the sound design process of Perils of Man.

"I’ve amassed a plethora of sound effects, and insuring they will be clear over the music, PLUS dialogue has been interesting. An interesting challenge is the fact that you may have certain fx looping in the background in addition to the music, voice stuff and individual fx. For instance, if the protagonist is in a room, when standing next to a window or a furnace an effect will play the entire time she is in range, and with that is the music, her interacting with objects, opening and shuffling through her inventory, making exclamations, etc. Fascinating to work on."

The really good news is that, according to the blog post, the first part should be releasing very soon (assuming IF Games still is going forward with its plans to release the game in two parts). It certainly sounds like an interesting concept. Hopefully it lives up to its potential.

Those who were waiting for Star Wars: Tiny Death Star to come out somewhere other than Australia don't have to wait any longer. As of November 8th, the game is available worldwide.

The freemium Star Wars themed Tiny Tower game is available now for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Windows 8. It will also be coming to the Amazon App store soon.

Source: Gamespot

Have you heard of The Synthetic Orchestra? I haven't either, or at least I hadn't until today, when our very own Thrik came rushing in, professing his love for it, and crying tears of joy over their rendition of the LeChuck theme.

And you know what? It's good, good enough for us to pretend like it's news worthy during this slow news month! Enjoy: