The International House of Mojo

Jurassic Park: The Game has gone gold, and IGN is celebrating the release next month with this behind-the-scenes video:

Source: Telltale Blog

Since it's off-topic Saturday and Halloween, I felt the need to inform you of the fact that GOG is running a Halloween promotion which includes all three Gabriel Knight games for $2.99 each. Given that at least one of them is a stone cold classic, you should totally buy it if you haven't done so already.

On a more Mojo-related note, The Adventure Shop is having a sale of its own, and one of the titles impacted is A Vampyre Story, presently selling for $12.99. What with you being all excited about the game thanks to our recently restored review, you will surely be all over that!

Source: GOG.com

This time we have two Autumn Moon related features for you: Jason's A Vampyre Story review from 2008 and our second Bill Tiller interview from 2010, also by Jason. Tiller talks about the making of his then newly released second game, Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island; additional back story that didn't make it into the game; and sequels that unfortunately are yet to be released.

Telltale has made the deluxe edition of Jurassic Park: The Game available for pre-order from their web shop for $39.99, which is $10 off regular price.

The following is included in the deluxe edition:

• All four episodes of Jurassic Park: The Game for PC/Mac on disc
• A replica InGen staff ID badge as seen in the movie and game
• A replica of the movie brochure/map, updated to reflect what you'll see in the game
• A replica Jurassic Park staff patch (yes, it's wearable)
• An InGen Field Guide, packed to the brim with content welcoming you to the park
• Exclusive Limited Edition Packaging
• Exclusive access to digital content including the game soundtrack and behind the scenes videos

The game is set for release on November 15th and any buyers of the deluxe edition can also download it from the website.

Source: Telltale Games blog

As the second feature of our Autumn Moon themed series, we present to you the Bill Tiller chat from 2007. Tiller joined us on December 30th, 2007 in the #monkey-island IRC channel. This resulted in a two hour Q&A session that Gabez edited down to a more coherent format which is again available for you to read! For those that want to read every word typed, the complete chat log is also available in our media archive.

Enjoy!

The retail release of Back to the Future: The Game for the Wii and Playstation 3 happened quietly yesterday. Both versions are retailing for $19.99 and are apparently hard to come by outside of Gamestop at the moment.

Man, how refreshing is it for us to be one day late on news?

Quick clarification/correction to make here, as we have misled you. Apparently the "six products" that Double Fine was touting at their special press event on October 14th are all now known, as three of the most recent Double Fine releases were included among that number. For the record, as Tim explained on the Double Fine forums, the six things being referred to were:

1) Psychonauts Mac
2) Psychonauts Vault Viewer
3) Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster
4) Costume Quest PC
5) Iron Brigade: Rise of the Martian Bear
6) Double Fine Happy Action Theater

Some sites, including this one, mistakenly interpreted the "six products" thing to refer to six upcoming things, but that was not the case. Sorry for the confusion. To make it up to you, allow us to point you to these limited edition posters from the press event that you can buy.

International recession got you down? Tired of wasting your days at home, applying for menial jobs in the insurance industry? Looking to take your first step into the heady world of online video game journalism?

Then you should probably apply to Kotaku or something.

However...

If you like working long hours, are obsessed with LucasArts+*, and think money is for the Man, then perhaps we can work something out.

The Job: Contributing reviews for famous website Mixnmojo.com. You will be writing timely reviews of any games that we cannot review amongst the existing staff.

The Pay: Hahaha!

(No, seriously, there is no money.)

The Benefits: Guaranteed job in later life at Telltale Games! (See Jake Rodkin, Telarium et al.)**

You: Willing to purchase new games on day one! We do occasionally get review codes - especially for Telltale games - but they're never guaranteed. We're not asking you to buy every new game that comes out, because - hey - that's too expensive. If, however, you pick up a decent number of the latest LucasArts, Double Fine, Telltale and Autumn Moon titles already, then that's what we need.

Ownership of (or access to) a Kinect would also be considered as a valuable commodity. Who the hell even has one of those? (Except Remi, obviously.)

The Catch: See section 2, "The Pay". Also, there's a test:

If you think this is the job for you, then we want you to prove it to us. Write a 200 word (approx) review of any game in the Mojo database, and send it on to us at jobs@mixnmojo.com. Don't freak out - just write it however you feel comfortable, and see what we think. What's the worst that could happen?

*Basically any games covered by this site - see here for details.

**Job at Telltale Games is not guaranteed.

The deranged Dave Grossman has massacred some more vegetation to bring you this year's entry into The Pumpkin House of Horrors. Called "Food Chain," the latest in Grossman's macabre litany of pernicious sculptures will no doubt bring amusement to those who derive pleasure from the pain of innocent pumpkins.

And we know that's you, so be sure to view the entries of previous years while you're at it.

Source: Phrenopolis

As Halloween is approaching, we'll be bringing back some of the features about the company most closely related to this holiday: Autumn Moon Entertainment. Since Bill Tiller quit LucasArts and founded his own company to make adventure games, Mojo has kept up with his actions. The first feature to return from the dusty Mojo archives is Gabez's interview with the man himself from 2007. Bill discusses his then upcoming game, A Vampyre Story, cancelled Full Throttle sequels (with images!), and takes Gabez out for an action filled lunch!

Read on!

Telltale just relaunched the official site for Jurassic Park: The Game, which is replete with stuff, things, and whatnots, but mostly just looks cooler.

Oh, and if you're looking to catch up on all the latest press coverage for Jurassic Park, you could always turn to Telltale's convenient roundup.

Tim Schafer's Double Fine studio is working on Happy Theatre Time, a collection of eighteen minigames heading through XBLA and for your Kinect sometime this winter. Kotaku are enthusiastic about Happy Theatre Time, having played a little, and describe it as a party game that's best experienced with a sufficient amount of alcohol or number of children at hand. Eurogamer talk some more about the game here. Destructoid has videos.

This whole thing, though, has made me notice a certain pattern, and not for the first time. From the press release:

Seriously, who is this "Tim Shafer" guy, and why does he always get mentioned alongside Tim Schafer? Is this a subtle way of telling us that Tim, much like Paul from The Beatles, isn't really Tim? Or is this guy's more involved in day-to-day Double Fine things than we know? Because - from the frequency of this mistake - it couldn't possibly be some sort of incompetence, could it?

Source: Eurogamer

I guess the various announcements that Double Fine announced during their event of announcements on Friday will be trickling out gradually depending on whatever embargo the press is bound by. Joystiq has confirmed one of them, it being DLC for Trenched Iron Brigade called "Rise of the Martian Bear." Stay tuned!

Source: Joystiq

Sam and Max: Beyond Time and Space - or Season Two, as it was once known - will be available on the PSN Store tomorrow. (Or today, for those of you who live in the futuristic world of Far East Asia.*) It's available for $19.99, or $29.99 for those of you who wish to get it packed with Sam and Max: The Devil's Playhouse. More here.

Personally, I recommend getting the game - or games, if you own neither. They're funny, well-realized gems, and can be wonderfully brilliant at times. They are perhaps superior to Hit the Road, and they are definitely superior to Sam and Max Save the World (or "Season One" for you purists). You probably don't want to miss out. I'm happy I didn't.

(*Not that you can buy the game, Far East Asians. It's going to be available in North America only. Power to the border-destroying internet, and all that.)

Source: Playstation Blog

So, apparently, sometime last week, Double Fine made it known that on October 14th (yesterday), they were going to host a press event to announce six new products - the PC version of Costume Quest being one.

It gets better. The press release, which is pretty funny, suggests that more PC ports aren't an impossibility. Interestingly, the funding for Double Fine's conversion of Costume Quest as well as the update of Psychonauts is due to funding from Dracogen, an investment company consisting of one dude that you would do well to keep your eye on.

And that's just one of the announcements Double Fine made at the event last night! We imagine any embargo on these new products - whether they be more PC ports, new DLC, or new games altogether (we've still a Ronzo game to become acquainted with) - will be lifted in a matter of days, so stay tuned, go buy all of Double Fine's new games, and sorry for not knowing any of this wonderful craziness was going on!

Thanks to Mojoer black_sheep for making us aware of this.

The last of Double Fine's four "Amnesia Fortnight" games, Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster, is out. It's been out for for four days, actually, as Jason notes in this other news-post about Costume Quest hitting the PC.

Has anyone been playing it? What do you think, if you have?

What the hey? Did Costume Quest, Double Fine's formerly console-exclusive RPG gem, suddenly become available on Steam out of nowhere as some sort of Halloween surprise? It sure seems that way! Grubbins on Ice comes included, and so terminates the complaints that the game isn't on PC. Go buy now and show why your voice was worth listening to!

In other Double Fines news, Once Upon a Monster was released earlier this week, and we totally forgot to mention it. Anyone play it?

Source: Steam

An Australian LucasArts graphic adventure fan succumbed to his carnal desires by stripping the backgrounds of some classic titles of their objects and sprites and making these fully exposed beauties available in full resolution on his imgur page. The backgrounds are taken from every SCUMM game from Maniac Mansion to The Dig (the latter not even 18 yet(!)), minus Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The enhanced and VGA versions are used as the source for those older games.

NSFW, obviously.

Source: neurotech's albums

Replay Games, which earlier this year licenced the rights to the Leisure Suit Larry games and re-released the first one on their website, has announced that they're working on an HD remake of this very game. Larry creator Al Lowe has joined the team and the plan is to continue making original Larry adventures in 2012. If the remake proves successful they may also attempt to remake the rest of the series. The actual development is handled by Adventure-Mob.

When asked about Larry in today's world, Al said: “As a software salesman, I think Larry would feel right at home [in today's Internet age], and would stay current … at least with pornography.”

“Why the hell would Mojo bother with this?”, you may ask yourself. Well, Telltale Games is going to release another game in the King's Quest series, which we'll cover, and Al Lowe did the music for the second King's Quest and worked as a programmer on the third and fourth games.

Source: EGM

The! Final! Cookchase! Podcast! (Until Christmas).

This week we were joined with The Tingler, albeit on a dodgy connection from China (apologies for the technical problems there!), and we also find out what happened to Gabriel after he dramatically exploded at the end of the last episode.

Also in this episode: a Cookchase News Round-up of the last week; a round-up of the last five months; settling a HOT TOPIC raging in our comments; e-mails from MarioColbert about meeting Tim Schafer; some exclusive news about Double Fine's plans to develop on the next version of the Wii; the etymology of 'dingbat'; the conclusion of the 'Impossible Sound Contest'; and thankyous and goodbyes.

Listen below, or go to our to download a higher quality copy. Listen to previous episodes here. Subscribe in iTunes here. Thanks to Roger 'Zaarin' Roger for editing and producing. The music at the end is 'La Nascita Della Cose Segrete' by Ludovico Einaudi.

The Mojo Video of the Week is being placed in retirement for the time being while we negotiate for more hard drive space. After uploading about a hundred videos a few months back we've had to stop because we're apparently seven kilobytes away from taking the site down. Anyway, look for the random Sunday picks to return once we're in a position to grow the collection.

For today, enjoy the suspect font choices of this Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island trailer:

In an interview with Dan Connors, Gamasutra learns that Telltale has found considerable success with the iPad, with Connors revealing that as of last month, a staggering 30% of the studio's monthly revenue came from iOS devices. As a result, the company continues to increase staff (they're north of 115 now) and will dedicate "considerable resources" to Apple platforms:
That there is the first acknowledgment in a long while of the Law & Order series. While surely the least exciting of the several licenses Telltale announced this year amongst this particular crowd, there were nonetheless some concerns about the project's status in light of the cancellation of Law & Order: Los Angeles, the particular series in the TV franchise that Telltale's treatment is based on. Obviously, fans of the series should consider their fears allayed.

The article goes on to discuss the potential of the Google and Amazon tablet devices while assuring fans the Telltale's other platforms (meaning PC and consoles) will not be neglected as a side effect of the aggressive love affair with iOS. But I shouldn't give everything away.

Source: Gamasutra

Cracked, a site for anything humorous, has proclaimed that Pirates of the Caribbean was, indeed, a rip-off of Monkey Island. An excerpt:

Rip-off or not? Does anyone really care anymore? Either way, it's a fun little read anyway.

Source: Cracked

As noted by Benny on the forums, some enterprising fellow has adapted the recent Psychonauts Steam update into a patch for all other PC versions of the games (meaning retail and digital versions from non-Steam vendors) so that we too may enjoy the enhancements.

Download the patch, which may or may not blow up your computer, here.

Source: GOG Forums

Dan Connors is interviewed by Gamespot in 2005, a month before the release of Out from Boneville. Jeepers, remember when they called their delivery service "Telltale Now?"

GDC Online, the conference that "focuses on connected games including casual, MMOs, virtual worlds, and social networking game," begins next week in Austin, Texas. One of the lectures attendees will have the opportunity to enjoy is The Hand of Fate: Authorial Voice in Game Design, given by none other than Dave Grossman. The GDC Online schedule indicates that the lecture will be video recorded, so even regular folk like us will likely be able to see it at some point.

As a sort of preview for the lecture, Gamasutra posted a five question interview with Grossman. It is unknown how much of the plot of next week's talk is spoiled here, so read at your own risk.

Source: Gamasutra