The International House of Mojo

Bgbennyboy's Quick & Easy toolset has been given an overhaul. The original "LEC Quick & Easy" program has been discontinued due to becoming too bloated and pointless. It's now been split into two smaller programs, "ScummVM Quick & Easy," and "VdmSound Quick & Easy." More details about the change can be found at the Q&E website.

Also new to the site are two handy utilities: "Resource File Creator and Dumper," for extracting, modifying, and re-inserting data from data files (like this), and "Index File Reader", a tool that does something or other I'm not sure of. If any of this sounds confusing it's simply because I've explained it poorly. Visit the Q&E website for clarity and enlightenment.

GFN hosted site Nightlight Productions has put up the second installment of Beneath Monkey Island, a radio drama featuring members of the MI fan community doing the voice work.

"But wait!" you say. "The first installment was released, like, six months ago, and I didn't get around to checking it out or have somehow misplaced the file between then and now."

Fear not, for 8 of 12, Nightlight webmaster and project leader for BMI, has put the first part back up for your listening pleasure. Once you've given these episodes a listen, be sure to pop over to the Nightlight forums to rant/rave your cold little hearts out.

Everyone knows that LucasArts has been producing games with fantastic soundtracks for almost 15 years, but has only ever released a small handful of them on actual CD's, leaving obsessive soundtrack-grubbing fiends out in the cold.

The new "LucasArts Soundtracks" website, hosted by the Scumm Bar, aims to fill the holes left in our hearts, and music collections, by the lack of soundtrack CD's for classic titles. They've created soundtracks for Sam & Max Hit the Road, Fate of Atlantis, the four Monkey Island games, and more. Check it out.

This is a week or so old, but I need to post something on Mojo before they take away my snack bar privileges...again. In case you didn't know already, Knights of the Old Republic is now available for PC, and to celebrate this, LFNetwork's center for hot KOTOR action, StarWarsKnights.com, has a shiny new design. So if you're an RPG fan like I'm not, or even if you're not, like I am, check out The New SWK.com for the latest on Knights.

Johnny "ThunderPeel2001" Walker has re-uploaded his game guide and walkthrough site for the classic Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade adventure game, and in addition to the old Last Crusade site, he's added a new section dedicated to helping you through Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Check it out at indyguide.mixnmojo.com.

The iMuse Island has interviewed veteran LucasArts musician Peter McConnell. The interview goes through McConnell's career at LucasArts and continues on to his current work on Tim Schafer's Psychonauts.

Everyone's favorite island, iMuse Island, has interviewed Jeff Kliment, manager of the LucasArts sound department. The interview covers the creation and editing of sound, voice, and music content in their games, official soundtrack CD's, and more. Check it out.

The excellent Listen to Me website has conducted an interview with Richard Horvitz, voice of Invader Zim. However, and more importantly, he voices the character of Raz in Tim Schafer's Psychonauts. Here's a quote we stole:

"Psychonauts is something I'm very proud of. When I went to San Francisco to do SketchFest 2003 with Fred Willard, I got to met Tim Schafer and went to where he works. He's a great guy and a friend of mine, although we only met through the project"

Follow the link to read more about his work on the upcoming Xbox game.

Finally some good news! In the past few days both The World of Monkey Island and The SCUMM Bar (now under new management) have come back online in full, or at least nearly so. And on top of that, Adventure Gamers has just come back this afternoon!

Unfortunately for everyone on the network, the hard drive from our old server has been more or less fully looked over by the drive recovery place, and they weren't able to get all the files back. A little more info on the HD recovery can be found here.

As for Mojo? Some of our files were recovered from the drive (apparently, thankfully, including our entire news archive and user database), so we plan to re-open at least partially within the next week.

And finally, if you're a webmaster of a Mojo hosted site who still hasn't been re-added since the crash and would like to re-upload your site yourself, please contact me, but don't send me more viruses dammit.

Ronda Scott, the infamous Internet Community Relations Specialist at LucasArts, has been intereviewed by Dragon Clan. Not only does the interview use a picture from our Press Day article, but they seem to have used the wrong picture. Oh well, we don't mind because Ronda managed to drop a plug in for the LFNetwork.

Though they only very very vaguely have anything at all to do with LucasArts, we host them and lrrrv them greatly. Yes, those animutations, the frightening flash movies where a disco dancing Simon Jeffery, 3-legged Pee-Wee Herman and any number of Japanese Pokemon songs all join together, and somehow make sense.

Anyway, yesterday (oops) was their second birthday, so in celebration you bored people should go and watch them all, because they rule..

Everyone's favorite captain, Captain Mystery, is back with his latest SCUMM Bar editorial. The captain is notorious around the Monkey Island sites for whining about fan art, whining about sequel gossip, whining about whiners, and, in his latest installment, whining about Monkey Island fans who hang out in #monkey-island on IRC (on the Gamesnet network, irc.gamesnet.net). Here's a clip:

My unforeseen absence can be put down to the fact I came third in Remi's sub-standard popularity contest poll a few weeks or months ago, with less than 20 per cent of you saying my articles were the best on this site. Naturally, this hammer blow to my ego caused me to sequester myself in a small cave, sobbing into my crumpled code wheel and reminiscing for the days when jokes about losing them were funny. You know what I mean. Yeah, 1992.

All ten of you who read this site and regularly visit #monkey-island are hopefully dreadfully offended dreadfully amused. Now go read the rest of the story.

World of Monkey Island has posted page 21 of Paco Vink's Secret of Monkey Island online comic. This page features the moment when Guybrush meets Elaine just after he attempts to steal her idol. Good times!

Over at the Mixnmojo Forums, a contest has just sprung up to see who can design the best new logo (and matching desktop icon) for bgbennyboy's killer app, LEC Quick & Easy. For those who don't know, LEC Q+E is a lifesaver for people trying to run classic LucasArts adventure titles in the newer Windows NT-based operating systems (namely, Windows 2000 and XP), with full sound and music.

The winner of this contest will get a whole lot of forum credits (the number keeps climbing!) for use at the LucasForums store, a game donated by Gabez, and quite possibly other neat junk.

To post your design, or to see the current entries, check out this thread. Go on, win the respect of forum mongers everywhere!

Blahhh! Everyone's favorite SCUMM Bar, The SCUMM Bar has a brand new highly-addictive time-waster: Virtual Insult Swordfighting. Match wits with the pirate greats (well, really just with the web server). It's pretty fun, and (sadly) keeps you coming back for more and more.

The fine folk over at Nightlight Productions are still looking for voice actors for their radio-drama project, Beneath Monkey Island (please see this news post for details).

8 of 12, Nightlight's founder and project leader, has informed me that they are still wanting to get more people to send in audition recordings, especially from women who are interested in doing the voice for Carla, the Sword Master of M?l?e Island?.

He also mentioned that this role would be a major one in Beneath Monkey Island - Carla would be co-starring with Guybrush in this story. So, if there are any women out there who are at all curious about getting involved with this project, please try out!

Find out the details about auditioning at the Nightlight Productions website. Get funky now.

In addition to the previous online chat with CMI lead artist Bill Tiller, Brimstone Beach Club has once again contacted Bill to ask a few questions that didn't make their way into the chat event.

Among them are very interesting gems of info concerning the setting of his new game, why he may or may not be back to work on Monkey Island 5, and the actual secrets of Monkey Island. Very interesting stuff, so I demand that you go read the answers now!

Nightlight Productions, the crazies behind the radio series Tierra de Los Muertos and Lost Cause: There's No Hope! are at it again. This time, they're searching for voice talent among the Monkey Island fan community for a new project: Beneath Monkey Island. They are holding auditions now, so check out the site for details!

After a bit too much planning and a surprisingly quick development time, we're proud to announce some brand spankin' new Monkey Island Discussion Forums on LucasForums. These forums now serve as Mojo's Monkey Island forum, as well as the official forum for the SCUMM Bar, Brimstone Beach Club, and EscapeMI.com. Of course, any other MI sites or communities are free to use them as well.

The lovely art at the top was painted by none other than Dan Lee, so be sure to thank him somehow, as it looks amazing. Go talk. Now.

For those of you who missed the chat/Q&A session with Bill Tiller on #brimstone yesterday, the Brimstone Beach Club now has a log of the event, color-coded and everything. Check it out by clicking here!