The International House of Mojo

It would be fair to say that TIE Fighter is the most widely beloved of the six excellent LucasArts games that GOG released yesterday, but many of those fans were disappointed when they discovered that the version being sold was not the version they were expecting.

Widely considered to be the definitive edition due to its enhanced graphics, cutscene voiceovers and extra expansions, the version released as the Collector's CD-ROM is the one most people remember, yet it's not being offered by GOG. Some assumed it was an oversight, but here was GOG's response:

That Disney is being so rigid in the way it licenses these games is disappointing - TIE Fighter is not the only LEC title with multiple versions. I found out that GOG is even restricted when it comes to documentation-related extras. When I inquired about why Fate of Atlantis and Sam & Max come with their hint books but not Monkey Island, I received an identical response.

After taking a sabbatical from pumpkin slaughter last year, beloved game designer Dave Grossman has resumed his almost as beloved annual tradition. Visit the Pumpkin House of Horrors and scroll to the bottom for this year's victim.

And on your way down, relive the hideous triumphs of previous years.

Source: The Pumpkin House of Horrors

The goal that the team at GOG.com has been working towards since it opened its doors back in 2008 has been accomplished. LucasArts games are now on GOG.com. X-Wing, Tie Fighter, Knights of the Old Republic, and The Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition are only available for Windows, while Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Sam & Max Hit the Road are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

That's right, the SCUMM games are actually using ScummVM! The lawyers who used to work for Lucas legal probably nearly had a heart attack when they read this news.

"Q4 2014" isn't merely the vague release information Telltale has offered on its upcoming Game of Thrones adaptation; it's basically the only information. So you can imagine my surprise when Telltale re-states that the first episode will be released before the new year.

This coincidentally puts the release three hundred and eighty-seven years ahead of George R.R. Martin's next release in the book series, which is expected to hit shelves December 2401.

As was revealed last month, Double Fine's space sim, Spacebase DF-9, has left early access due to a lack of additional funding. They have polished up the game to a commercial state, adding a tutorial and a system that will let the player work towards concrete objectives, as well as squashing most of the outstanding bugs (for example, the major problems that had made the Linux version unplayable have been resolved now). They have also released the full Lua source code so that fans can make mods for the game.

Although no new features will be added by Double Fine after this release, they will still be offering support for the game and making bugfixes for reported bugs. They have also reduced the price to $20.01 USD and have started a bundle offering both of their games that have now left Early Access, Spacebase DF-9 and Hack 'N' Slash, for $24.99.

In addition, anyone who already owns Spacebase DF-9 will get a free copy of Hack 'N' Slash, and anyone who already owns Hack 'N' Slash will get a free copy of Spacebase DF-9. If you already own both, Double Fine's Greg Rice has confirmed that you will receive a giftable copy to give to a friend.

Update 2: The news is now official, so the link has been changed to the correct, working one.

Update: The link to the confirmation is now broken because it was a leak of information GOG intends to make public tomorrow. Check back then for the real deal.

Original Post: As Jennifer broke, the rumors were true! GOG has cut a deal with Disney to release LEC games on its service. And now we have titles. GOG confirmed that "about" 30 games will be made available in total, starting tomorrow with the following six:

You'll note that only three of those are digital debuts, but hey, Sam & Max Hit the Road and TIE Fighter are finally available again! Let's hope all fourteen classic adventures make the cut. Seriously, these are exciting times. Speculate below!

Source: Good Old Games

Update: The teaser fonts are confirmed to be real, as they are now live on the GOG.com website.

We've gotten our hopes up before that LucasArts games would be released on GOG.com when the site previously teased that they were going to add a large publisher to their catalog (not to mention the Night Dive rumors). Well, the rumors are here again, as GOG.com is teasing that another publisher will be adding their games to the catalog, with a countdown timer on their main page.

There might be some weight to the rumor that the publisher is LucasArts this time, as a GOG.com user has reportedly found three countdown images on the GOG.com website that use well known LucasArts fonts. Of course, if it does end up being LucasArts, it's uncertain if any games that aren't already released digitally will be released on GOG.com, as the three franchises represented (Indiana Jones, Star Wars, and Monkey Island) already have games available digitally on Steam. But, at least this time signs do seem to point towards DRM-free versions of LucasArts games finally being available soon.

Midnight City just announced the release date for Costume Quest 2 on PSN for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. It will be released on the 28th of October for both systems and will include a Sackboy costume that is exclusive to the Sony platforms.

The beta (which is a near-complete version of the game that can be played from start to finish) for Massive Chalice is out now for people who pledged $50 or more. If you're one of those people, you should have received your codes from Humble Bundle. If not, contact Humble Bundle support and they'll get you sorted. According to the Massive Chalice blog, the plans for the release of the game for those who didn't back high enough for beta access will be announced soon, after the team sees how the beta period goes.

While we're on the subject of Double Fine, they're going to be holding a free to attend Day of the Devs event again this year, on November 1st at the Old Mint Building in San Francisco from 4PM to 11PM. They'll have lots of recent and upcoming Double Fine games to play, like Costume Quest 2, Massive Chalice, Grim Fandango Remastered, and more. There will also be a lot of games available to play from the other developers that are part of the event. To see the full list of games and to make a reservation for the event if you plan to attend, check out their Facebook event page.

It's been awhile since we've had anything firm, hard, or otherwise unyielding to pressure with regard to the second half of Broken Age, but Double Fine has offered an update a few days ago. They published said update on their Kickstarter page, and since there's an installment of the ongoing 2 Player documentary to go along with it, the post is backer-exclusive. Which means I can't really do much but tell you to go check it out, a suggestion I make under the safe assumption that a few of your dollars rest among the 3+ million the project racked up.

In the absence of a link, I can give you the Cliff Notes version, which is that Tim has finished writing the game, and the voice recording is nearing an end. There's a few other milestone factoids like that, but what they get vague about real quick is the release date you likely sought. In light of that I'm gonna go ahead and assume we won't get to play this until 2015, which is fine by me, because Remi has made short work of my free time lately.

Source: Broken Age Kickstarter

...is in the works, you'll soon be sorry to know. (Click for a reminder of Remi's assholery.)

Gamasutra released an article detailing the effort to rebuild and preserve the world's first commercial graphical massively multiplayer online game, Lucasfilm's Habitat.

The original Habitat, which had an interface and graphics similar to the adventure game Labyrinth, was released in beta form by Lucasfilm Games (now LucasArts) for the Quantum Link online service for Commodore 64 from 1986 until it was shut down in 1988. A sized down version was released as Club Caribe on Quantum link in January 1988. Fujitsu later licensed the code and released Fujitsu Habitat in Japan in 1990. Habitat and Club Caribe was highly influential, and it's code still lives on through WorldsAway, which premiered on CompuServe in 1995, and moved to the public internet in 1997. WorldsAway had multiple worlds, two of which survive today and are now known as Dreamscape and NewHorizone. Dreamscape was Fujitsu's first virtual world, and appeared when WorldsAway premiered in 1995. NewHorizone was originally Club Connect when it was launched by Fujitsu in 1998 and New Radio World when the WorldsAway worlds were sold and became part of an online world known as VZones in December 1998. New Radio World was renamed VZConnections in December 1999, and then newHorizone in September 2001. These two worlds are still a part of vZones, and the WorldsAway software has also recently been licensed for use in MetroWorlds.

The preservation project was spearheaded by Alex Handy, founder and director of the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment. The project has official permission from Fujitsu, the company that purchased Habitat from Lucasfilm, to get the Habitat software working again. In order to get the project off the ground, Handy enlisted the help of the creators of Habitat, Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer, and Stratus, the company who made the Nimbus servers that Habitat ran on. They were given a Stratus computer, manufactured in 1989, and upgraded to use a 1999 era TCP/IP protocol.

On September 25, 2014, Morningstar and Farmer, and over a dozen hackathon attendees at the MADE video game museum, as well as people working remotely through IRC, set out to get Habitat running again. The hardest part was the Quantum Link code, so they utilized the Quantum Link Reloaded open source project.

There is still a ways to go, as they don't have access to all the support libraries that are needed for the Quantum Link server, so those need to be emulated in order to work properly. But, they have come a long way, and still intend to finish. Once the project is complete, anyone will be able to log in using a C64 emulator.

You can read more about the effort, and donate to the cause if you so desire, over at the Habitat Preservation Project page at the MADE website.

Double Fine has teamed up with Indiebox, the subscription service that ships boxed collector's editions of indie games to gamers' doors each month, to release a Brütal Legend Limited Edition for PC, Mac, and Linux to celebrate the 5th anniversary of the release of the game.

You can subscribe for as many months as you want (which will give you another indie game special edition each month), but if you only want Brütal Legend, there's an option for one month for $16.99 USD + shipping and handling.

Double Fine's remastered version of Tim Schafer's magnum opus of his LucasArts years, Grim Fandango, was demoed at Indiecade. Game journalists have played that demo and shared their thoughts.

IGN describes the new version as follows:

You have the ability to toggle back and forth between how the game originally looked, and how it looks now, and holy moly the difference is night and day. Thanks to the new lighting, shaders, and other technical enhancements that flew way over my head, Manny and company now look incredible. Their in-game models appear to be nearly identical to their cut-scene counterparts, which is great. The game is still presented in 4:3, but you have the ability to stretch it to widescreen (for the love of everything good, please don’t do this). The borders are black right now, but I was told that the developers are toying with some ideas for what could stand on the two sides of the screen.

In addition, Double Fine has also added some bonus features to the game:

The final big change I stumbled across was the awesome inclusion of nodes scattered throughout the world that contain small snippets of commentary from Tim Schafer, Peter Chan, Peter McConnell, and a ton of other folks who helped make the game so special back in 1998.

Polygon has also shared their thoughts on the demo, and have confirmed that the original's tank controls will be an option for the purists who prefer to play the game that way.

It looks like Grim Fandango Remastered is shaping up to be great. The rest of us will get a chance to play it for ourselves once it's released in early 2015.

The Steam version of Costume Quest 2 is out now for PC, Mac, and Linux.

It will also be coming soon for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Wii U, Xbox 360, and Xbox One, although release dates for those versions have not yet been announced.

Update by Jennifer: The campaign is also now accepting Paypal donations for the digital tiers (you'll find the Paypal links at the bottom of the main page). So, if you wait for that option before backing a crowdfunding campaign, and if you want to play a campaign with an awesome art design by Bill Tiller and a game design by Dave Grossman, Bill Tiller, and Gene Mocsy, then you can now be a backer as well.

Oh, and my rendition of the pirate song is on its way. Since I actually made that promise myself, I'll try to get it done soonish. :)

Original post:

There's a first time for everything.

Duke Grabowski up and got itself funded by the skin of its teeth, and there was much rejoicing. Don't forget that although the minimum amount has been reached, you can still pledge money to the project so that it can hit some of its stretch goals. One of them is "new swashbuckling music," which I'm taking to mean that Pedro Macedo Camacho will compose new stuff as opposed to his Ghost Pirates tracks being recycled.

As for me, I apparently owe you guys some sort of re-creation of the wedding scene from Monkey Island 1? At least, that's what Remi seems to have effeminately (and unilaterally) obligated me to, and I'm nothing if not a man of Remi's word. So while I'm not putting a clock on it, stay tuned for a deranged grotesquerie of some sort.

Source: Kickstarter

The Walking Dead Season One and Season Two is coming to Xbox One and PlayStation 4 on October 24. Both physical and digital versions of the game will be released on the same day.

The Duke Grabowski Kickstarter now needs less than $5,000 to make it's goal. There's just three days left to go, but it's certainly doable. They've posted an interesting update about how Dave Grossman got onboard. Apparently Bill's helping Dave out with art for one of his projects, and Dave's helping Bill out with game design on his. So, we'll hopefully be seeing the results of another Dave Grossman and Bill Tiller collaboration in the future.

The update also includes information about slots being opened up for the higher tiers. So, if you've been holding back because you wanted to back at one of the sold out higher tiers, you're in luck, as more slots have been added to these tiers. Go ahead and grab them quick if you're interested (there's some neat goodies in there, like getting to voice a character named after you for $300, or if you have some money to burn, having Bill fly to your house and paint a mural on your wall for $10,000).

Of course, the most important incentive is that if this is funded, you'll get to watch Jason reenact the Melee Island wedding scene, and watch me perform the Curse of Monkey Island pirate song. So, go ahead and back. You know you want to.

We reported in September that Spacebase DF-9, Double Fine's open-development, early access space station simulator was gearing up for a 1.0 release, thus ending a production that was originally hoped to go on for at least five years.

In a Steam forum post referenced by PC Gamer, Tim explains the business reality behind the decision to finalize the game earlier than originally anticipated.

For the entire explanation, read the complete article.

Source: PC Gamer

The Perils of Man: Episode 1, the first part of the two part adventure with a game design by Bill Tiller and Gene Mocsy of Autumn Moon (and co-written by Mocsy as well), is now out for iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch for $4.99. Your five bucks will get you all seven chapters of The Perils of Man, as you'll get the first three chapters now in episode one, and the remaining four chapters at no additional cost once episode two is released in December.

The game is excellent, but if you'd prefer to try before you buy, chapter one (the first third of episode 1) is available on iTunes for free.

Update: If you don't have an iOS device, you'll have to wait a bit longer. According to The Perils of Man Frequently Asked Questions page, they are currently developing the game for Android devices as well as PC, Mac, and Linux.