The International House of Mojo

Look, I'm as shocked as you are. In the 15+ years I've known elTee, aka LucasTones, I have never known him to be a con. But now? That Monkey Island EGA to VGA image? Fake news! And I'm clearly not to blame, as Tones admits in his introduction…

OK, so maybe I'm partly at fault. Even close to fully. However! It wasn't really a fake screenshot, was it? It was from a genuine, playable moment in The Secret of Monkey Island, with the EGA graphics ported VGA style. So how did it happen? And how can you do it yourself?

Read Tones's glorious Mojo comeback, in what I personally find to be our most fascinating article in years. (Granted, the competition isn't stiff.) Read, and then forgive us. We did it out of love.

Remember that thread on LucasForums fifteen years or so ago about the canceled VGA version of Secret of Monkey Island? Of course you do, because all of you who are here now were there then.

If you don't recall: There was an early effort to create a fairly straight VGA port of the in-development EGA version. Presumably LEC decided to attempt something a bit more extravagant, and we do, of course, all know the final VGA version which today might be considered the de facto MI1. (Although that, really, should be the Amiga version. ¬)

The earlier version was in a playable state, with some (but far from all) of the graphics converted to 256 colors. See below for a screenshot, which, to me, reminds me of the VGA version of Loom.

The good news: This version of the game works with ScummVM, and we will have the resource files available hopefully within the next week. (Which means you can play the game if you already possess MI1.) Our deep throat is putting a couple of compatibility fixes into place as we speak, so stay tuned for more soon.

For now -- this is what could have been:

Look, I don't know what this whole Discord thing really is -- we use it for podcast recording (two more have been recorded -- start bugging Zaarin to finish editing them) -- but apparently they've built a store. Because we need another one? Either way, Psychonauts and Brütal Legend are available for free with "Nitro" (I don't even know), so go grab them if that's your thing. Discord, that is. Double Fine obviously already is.

It does not seem that long ago when LucasArts then-president Simon Jeffery was lending quotes to press releases and celebrating their games' fan modifications. Flash forward a decade and a half, and while it is lovely to see that the LucasFilm letterhead stationery is still getting some usage, those halcyon days of Lucas sanctioned fan activities are nothing but a distant memory.

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Fresh off agreeing to help finish season four of The Walking Dead, Skybound talks some smack* about Telltale. Of interest:

Translated: They’re doing what TTG should have done during a difficult time of layoffs. More to be found over at Variety

• Smack might not be talked.

Source: Variety

Limited Run Games announced on Twitter that a physical Broken Age release will be available for pre-order on the 12th of October, and will only be available for two weeks. The Limited Run Switch release of Broken Age joins its PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita brethren, as the latter had physical versions released by Limited Run Games back in 2017.

Switch cartridge production takes a while and once the cartridges are finished, they need to be shipped from Japan to the United States, where Limited Run Games will pack the cartridge in a standard Switch case. The cool thing about these Limited Run Switch releases is that each game comes with a complete byte-sized manual, which is a really rare thing nowadays.

Because of the long production time, it's likely that the Limited Run physical release of Broken Age for Switch won't ship until January.

The official Twitter page of The Walking Dead was updated with news that Skybound, The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman's company, will be finishing the final two video game episodes of The Walking Dead: The Final Season.

Telltale previously stated that they were looking towards multiple partners to hire the staff of The Walking Dead Season Four so that they could finish the season properly. So, it looks like there's a (tiny) bit of good news for at least some the staff members that were let go from Telltale without warning last month.

If you want to read more dirt on Telltale’s abrupt closure, look no further than this article from The Verge. There isn’t a whole lot of new information in there, but it serves as a good summation of the time leading up to the closure.

Worth noting is the confirmation of what a lot of us suspected: The Walking Dead-fatigue is indeed a thing, and good as season four could have been -- or will be, as TTG, the classy joint it is, is shopping around for another company to finish up the remaining episodes -- the games just weren’t selling. Couple that with two investors that weren’t as ready to put money up as the company thought they were, and here we are.

Don’t take my word for it, though -- go read.

Source: The Verge

Late night host Conan O'Brien maintains a pretty active online presence, and one of the things his digital wing sometimes does is post video game live streams to the Conan Youtube channel. These streams are hosted by the Conan team's resident gamer Aaron Bleyaert.

Well, it looks like the latest one of these deals was for Grim Fandango. The stream just ended, but it is available on Youtube for posterity. I kinda skimmed through it, and it looks like Aaron liked the game, without getting very far. Check it out below:

Mark Darin created a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. You may remember Mark Darin as a designer at Telltale that helped create some of their best games (Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, Puzzle Agent, Hector: Badge of Carnage, The Walking Dead, Tales from the Borderlands, and Batman Season Two, among many, many others).

Now he is going back to his roots. Before he became a designer at Telltale, he designed two free adventure games: Nick Bounty: A Case of the Crabs and Nick Bounty: The Goat In The Grey Fedora. He is now creating a third game in the series, that you can help fund now by going to the Nick Bounty and the Dame with the Blue Chewed Shoe Kickstarter page

Or, as it is, totally Infernal Machine. That's right, ATM informs us the 1999 classic -- if you're into this kind of stuff -- is available for purchase over at GOG. (Windows only, natch.) Grab it if you so desire.

Source: ATMachine

A lot of questions have come up regarding Telltale. I thought about putting this as an update to Jason's PSA, but I thought it deserved its own post. Here are the answers to the main questions I've heard in the comments here and at the Telltale forums. If you have any further questions, feel free to ask them in the comments, and I'll try my best to answer them.

• Telltale's older games, up to The Walking Dead Season One, have had their DRM removed at the Telltale website prior to their closing, so they no longer have to go through Telltale server authentication to play.
• If you purchased the game from the Telltale Store, the newer titles, from 2013 to 2018 (excepting 400 Days as that's considered part of The Walking Dead Season One) - The Wolf Among Us to The Walking Dead: The Final Season episode 2 - need to authenticate with Telltale's servers before playing. The server is still active, although it's unknown how long that will continue to be the case.
• Telltale server authentication is not required if the game was purchased from other outlets such as Steam, GOG.com, or Humble Bundle, or if you own the retail discs. These will of course still have some DRM depending on the outlet (such as Steam's server authentication).
• Telltale's season pass discs included one or more episodes, with the rest needing to be downloaded. The season pass disc is your authentication. However, it's unknown how long the Telltale website will remain online, so it's recommended to download the remaining episodes as soon as possible.
• All of the Telltale developed games (and Hector: Badge of Carnage) can be re-downloaded from the Telltale website at the moment if you had already purchased them (except for Poker Night 2 since they never sold that at their store). This includes titles removed from sale at digital outlets, such as Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures and Law & Order Legacies.
• Prior to their closing, I worked with the web team to get the old games available again by supplying my retail cover art for the missing games, unfortunately, they said they couldn't put up the old third-party games they used to sell (Kings Quest collection, Monkey Island special editions, etc.) because they couldn't remove the DRM. Unfortunately, if you purchased a third-party game at the Telltale Store (other than Hector: Badge of Carnage), they can no longer be redownloaded.
• Telltale's games will remain downloadable at other digital outlets such as Steam, GOG.com, etc., even if the games are removed from sale at some point.
• The older games (Telltale Texas Hold'em, Sam & Max: Season One and Two, etc.) crash when running in Windows 10. These games can be played by removing the 'prefs.prop' file, although you may be restricted to playing in a window. Sadly, this applies to games purchased at any outlet, including the retail discs.
• If you have a certificate error, this workaround might help (thanks to Jones Jr. for the solution). Update: I was informed by Telltale alum TheSeg that these are Symantec Legacy certificates. These are not allowed in the latest Chrome betas. Using the stable branches of browsers should work, but of course, this will only work as long as the stable branch isn't caught up with the beta branch.

The Telltale support staff is gone now, so you'll get an automated message informing you of this fact if you try to contact them. During my tenure as a moderator at the Telltale forums, I talked extensively with the support staff and the web team on workarounds for a lot of problems. These staff members are gone now, so I don't have direct contact with staff anymore, but I'll try my best to answer any question you may have if you leave a message in the comment section of this post.