You can pay whatever you want for the bundle as long as you meet the minimum price (currently just over $5.50 USD). The other games in the bundle include Chime, Adventures of Shuggy, Dangerous High School Girls In Trouble!, The Network, and the bonus game The Witch's Yarn. If you pay more than $8.00 USD, you will also get the music albums Calm Your Nerves and Chip unDeath.
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Gaming Examiner has a glimpse of the first screenshot of The Walking Dead episode 4. They also have a statement, direct from Telltale, that the episode will be launching "very soon this October".
Telltale also has a video of their Walking Dead presense up at PAX, as well as a link to the a video of the complete PAX panel at the end of the video.
Thanks to a tweet on Telltale's Telltale's official Twitter, we now know The Walking Dead will be complete, barring any unforeseen circumstances, by the end of the year, since it will be coming to retail disc on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on the 4th of December.
Release dates for the retail version of the game in Europe have not yet been announced.
Double Fine Adventure (codenamed Reds) is being steadily worked on, and art is being made and shown off for it all the time. If you're not a backer, you still have time to rectify that and become one so you can get access to the private backer forum and see the progress for yourself.
Or (or, even better, and) you can buy the Double Fine Adventure Lumberjack Print in pure Bagel style* for yourself for a mere $30.
* That would be the style of Nathan "Bagel" Stapley, the lead artist of Double Fine Adventure
There's been a bit of news of the fluff variety, so like last month, I'm going to include all the tidbits in one post.
The development period for Telltale's The Walking Dead is brisker than usual for the series, as Nick Herman updated his twitter with news that the episode 4 playtest has already been completed.
On the subject of Telltale, a rumor that a second season of Back to the Future: The Game is coming comes straight from Christopher Lloyd, who announced at the Fan Expo in Canada that he's once again playing Doc Brown in an upcoming game in the series.
Finally, over at Double Fine, the lead artist of Middle Manager of Justice, Mark Hamer, posted about the art of the game, including some concept art. Along with this comes the news that this game started out as one of the Amnesia Fortnight titles which was refined from it's original seriousness and rigidity into the quirky title that it is today (or will be when it's released shortly).
Valkian has finally finished the second issue of The Thrillville Quarterly! I'll let him describe the new issue himself:
That magnificent cover illustration [pictured below] was made by Jón Kristinsson, who makes some wonderful adventure game tributes. Among the many great articles featured, we have this interview with Dave Grossman, an article by Gabez on imagination and Escape From Monkey Island, one by elTee on the Double Fine Adventure and a short story by Haggis, among some other things.
Now go read!
Source: The Thrillville Quarterly
The Escapist is reporting that Double Fine accidentally released their iOS Super Hero sim onto iTunes in every region in an unfinished state on September 5th. Unfortunately, due to the difference between Mojo Time™ and real time, we weren't able to get the news out in time for Mojo readers.
But those who were lucky enough to download the unfinished build before it was pulled have now become beta testers. The game's project leader, Kee Chi, states that if you find any bugs to send bug reports to Double Fine. Any items bought during the beta will still be available in the full game. But Chi cautions that this is not the experience Double Fine wanted players to experience and recommends waiting until the completed version is released in the upcoming weeks.Telltale CEO Dan Connors said "Steve Purcell created something unique, funny and enduring that continues to grab new fans every single year; now's the perfect time for gamers to see what all the fuss is about and for current fans to complete their collections with these special offers."
"Sam & Max have always had a happy home at Telltale", said creator Steve Purcell. "They just "get" what Sam & Max is about and so these games are the perfect place to enter their world. It's wonderful and gratifying that after 25 years, Sam & Max continue to make people happy and I'm excited that these offers provide gamers with an opportunity to play the marvelously inventive games that Telltale made. Here's to another 25 years!"
Source: Game N Guide
Schafer admits that he's not entirely blame free and that Vivendi, EA and Double Fine all took part in its notorious bait-and-switch.
"Vivendi was like 'No. Absolutely not. We'll never say RTS, ever. Even if someone asks us if it's an RTS we'll say no.'"
"EA mostly just didn't emphasise it," Schafer says. "They never told us not to talk about it. In fact, they did a whole press event at a bar in San Francisco that was all about the multiplayer. We released our multiplayer tutorial trailer before the game came out, so they weren't hiding it at all."
As far as Double Fine goes, it released a hugely misleading demo that focused on the game's driving and melee combat. This was entirely due to accessibility reasons regarding the game's steep learning curve. "The demo was kind of an accident," explains Schafer. "The mechanics ramp up slowly over time, so the demo is usually the first mission, so you just don't know those complicated RTS mechanics yet."
When you're playing through Brutal Legend as a story, though, as you can't blame anyone for doing, you don't really have the context that the stage battles are meant to be the core and that in a sense the single player campaign is a (elaborate, extremely lovingly crafted) kind of training for the multiplayer, and for many the experience came off as an open word action/adventure that had a bizarre identity crisis midway through.
However assumptions or marketing colored one's expectations, the final game was certainly an unusual hybrid of gameplay types that many people didn't know what to make of, and considering the absolute distaste a large sect of gamers apparently reserve for even the most simplified of RTS mechanics out of principle (just glance at the Eurogamer comments), one can kind of see where the cynical Vivendi marketers were coming from.
Personally? I don't fault the vision of the game at all, and blame the response on its scale, which seems to have grown almost too much over development. Here is what should have been a great cult game that got packaged as a blockbuster thanks to the extra single player tinsel, a celebrity cast, an expensive soundtrack and tons of marketing that proved to give the mainstream the wrong idea. Had Brutal Legend been of a similar scope to Iron Brigade, I suspect it would have been understood.
The full interview also contains Tim's thoughts on free-to-play, and how it may have allowed him to execute ideas he had for improving Brutal Legend and Costume Quest post-launch. And as for Psychonauts 2?
"Nothing new has happened there, but it's still something that's an ongoing process. I'm still interested in that."
Source: Eurogamer
Micheline Chau, president and COO of Lucasfilm, has retired after two decades with the company, Lucasfilm announced on Wednesday.
Kathleen Kennedy, who joined Lucasfilm as co-chairman in June, will serve as interim president. The heads of the various departments, such as Industrial Light & Magic animation, LucasArts (gaming) and licensing, will report to Kennedy for the time being.
Right, then.
Source: The Wrap
Sam and Max's "lack of a functioning moral compass might make them a long shot to drive a major studio production," but the cartoon cop duo "would make a great movie", creator Steve Purcell believes.
Talking to VideoGamer.com about his role in the development of recent Pixar tie-in Brave: The Video Game, Purcell said that "Sam & Max have proved themselves remarkably resilient to adaptation".
"They always manage to maintain the integrity of their lunacy no matter the medium. I think they would make a great movie."
Purcell debuted the characters in a comic book in the 1980s, before releasing classic PC point & click Sam & Max: Hit The Road in 1993. The pair later spawned a TV series, before Purcell moved to Pixar in the early noughties.
So given his big screen experience, why hasn't Purcell attempted to take Sam & Max to Hollywood?
"I've just tended to keep Sam & Max separate from my work at Pixar so there's never any confusion about it," he continued.
"I think Sam & Max's lack of a functioning moral compass might make them a long shot to drive a major studio production. Though I'm certainly not opposed to giving it a shot."
Source: VideoGamer.com
To truly become a PlayStation 2 Classic, we wanted to ensure Psychonauts had all the time it needed to grow into its status as a classic, like a fine artisanal Tuscan cheese. But less smelly.
Source: Playstation.Blog
Last week, Lucasfilm (the parent company of LucasArts) secretly registered several “Star Wars: First Assault” domain names like StarWarsFirstAssault.com. It was suspected that the names had something to do with a yet-to-be announced video game project.
More information has surfaced in recent days in the way of two new trademark applications submitted to the United States Patent and Trademark Office. On August 23, 2012, Lucasfilm Entertainment Company Ltd. filed trademarks for “First Assault” (Serial Number: 85711610) and “Star Wars: First Assault” (Serial Number: 85711618).
Source: Fusible
Another year of PAX Prime has come and gone. The companies that Mojo covers were represented there, so I thought I'd make a big post covering everything Mojo-related that happened there. But then I realized that the pickings were small for the Mojo crowd this year, so a long post isn't needed.
Telltale had their live recording of their Playing Dead webseries that looks inside the making of The Walking Dead game with questions asked by fans and answered by the writers and developers of the game. They also had some neat swag called the Undead Survival Kit that they were giving away to a lucky few attendees. That's it, unfortunately. It was all Walking Dead oriented. No news on King's Quest or even Fables, which was said to be arriving by quarter three of this year. Since this month would be the last month of the Q3 2012 release window, I think it's safe to say Fables will miss it's original announced release date.
Double Fine was also represented there, with footage shown from the 2 Player Productions documentary about the Double Fine Adventure. They also showed off Ron Gilbert's upcoming adventure with platforming elements, The Cave. There's a load of new screenshots at Mr. Gilbert's blog. The big news is that The Cave isn't just coming to PlayStation 3, PC, and Xbox 360. It's also coming to the Wii U eShop.
Double Fine also showed off their sequel to Happy Action Theater, which has been renamed Kinect Party (it's a wonder publisher Microsoft let them use a clever original title for the original in the first place). Interestingly, in an interview with Eurogamer, Double Fine mentioned they'd like to do an "after dark" version with minigames that aren't child friendly such as "a level that made players shoot explosive diarrhea from their bottoms anytime they'd bent over", "a system that allows you to attach objects to characters such as extra limbs or body parts, and some of them are not meant for family", and most interestingly "having scary things happen only when one player would be present. Then people would drag their friends over to show them the offending terror only for it to not happen with another person present. Then they'd look crazy". Letting the Double Fine go crazy with uncensored Kinect minigames would certainly be interesting, to say the least.