The International House of Mojo

Hey, what the hell is your problem. It's almost time for us to put up our Loom Secret History article and you haven't sent in your reader opinion yet. I mean seriously.

UPDATE: Don't make the Swan angry.

Absolutely nothing happened.

Nothing at all.

Move along.

Now then, back to our regularly scheduled programming!

UPDATE: There is absolutely no truth in the rumours you may have heard.

And in other news...

So this is what he's up to when not writing news posts.

With our most recent "Secret History" article published, it's now once again time for you guys to send in your reader opinions for the next one. The game we'll be giving the treatment to next month is of course the beloved Brian Moriarty fantasy Loom, and we need you to send in your thoughts on the game for inclusion in the appropriate section of the article.

What, you've never heard of Loom? What, are you an idiot? Go download the game e-mail LucasArts, who surely wouldn't discontinue the printing of such a significant title, about ordering a copy. They don't have it listed in their online store, but that's just because they want you to ask about it.

The Loom article will be published online in May, and I hope in the meantime you guys play or replay Loom in celebration. Anybody manage to get past the part with the tent?

One of the gears in our machinery went missing today and all that was left was a hankie with the word Petite Pettitt Pettit written on it. Quite mysterious!

Fortunately we were able to use a combination of Gabez's fingers and Spaff's long dead eyes to create a new gear.

Mojo, the only site that uses body parts of current and former staff to bring you the latest news!

The third instalment of Mojo's riveting LucasArts' Secret History series will soon be upon you.

This time we'll be looking into Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure. In case you haven't done so already (and so doing risk having your face melted by the almighty), send your opinions for our aptly named Opinions page to this address. See your name in lights and get an amusing avatar all to yourself!

Let's face it, everyone thought The Unofficial Sam & Max Web Site looked pretty bland, and just never quited achieved that "Web 2.0" feel we all really wanted from it.

Thankfully, they've finally thrown out their ugly placeholder page and revealed the new site, which finally delivers the goods. Hopefully our other hosted sites follow suit.

Yes, we only put up the Zak article a short while ago, but it's already time for us to start collecting reader opinions for the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade article.

I've gotta say, I've been pretty disappointed with the turnout for this part of the articles so far. Surely more than six non staffers have something to say about a LucasArts adventure game on mixnmojo.com? That's why you're going to do me proud this time around and restore my faith in you. It's also only fair to mention that I have a handy list of every registered member of the site, and if you fail to send your own submission, we're just going to write one for you, and our version may or may not include inaccurate descriptions of your weight and sexual preferences. Just a little heads up.

Anyway, now's the time to start replaying Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in preparation for the best article ever written about the game that's going to be published by Mojo next month. Did I mention that you should really send in your reader opinions?

You will remember our first backward gaze into the forest of quondam LucasArts; now look again at the second part of LucasArts' Secret History as we return to Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders.

The game is twenty years old this year: what can it say to us about the past? What can we say to it about the future?

(Thanks again to Dan Lee for the awesome art work.)

As suggested in the previous post, IndyJones.net is now fully up-to-date! Hooray!

It's been a personal mission of mine over the last month or so to make IndyJones live up to its tagline 'The Number One Source for Indiana Jones Gaming!' I now think we're there!

Here's the full list of updates I've added to the site:

• Added Last Crusade Info & Music Pages. Last Crusade is getting on a bit now, but is still one of the major Indy Games. It deserves some respect!
  
• Added Emperor's Tomb Reviews and Music Pages, Updated Emperor's Tomb Info page. Been a long time coming, but now Emperor's Tomb is fully updated. The Music page is the most worthwhile addition, as there isn't anything like it on the net. Now you can enjoy Clint Bajakian's last and greatest Indiana Jones soundtrack!
  
• Added Lego Indy & 2008 Previews Pages. Now you can keep up with all the latest previews for the upcoming Indy games on one handy site!
  
• Updated Lego Indy and 2008 Facts pages. Now we know a lot more about both, whether Facts or Rumours! Any notable videos have been put on these pages too.
  
• More Images added to Lego Indy. We'll keep on adding any good ones as they come out.
  
• Added 'Hidden Room 2', 'An artist's signature' and Images to Infernal Machine Trivia page. Well, I didn't know about the Close Encounters room until recently!
  
• Added Infernal Machine Music page. This is the big one, but I've talked about enough in the post below! The only one of its kind!
  
• Updated Desktop Adventures page. Added Info and box-art for the runt of the 90s Indy litter.
  
• Added Greatest Adventures page. The lovechild of Super Star Wars and Indiana Jones finally gets its own page.
  
• Updated Fan Games to include Last Crusade 2. Whether any of these games will be released or not is another matter.
  
• Added Revenge of Ancients page. The first ever Indy adventure game gets a page!
  
• Added Cancelled Games page. A detailed page for all the Indy games that didn't quite make it. Well, did you know the Spear of Destiny actually exists, was actually captured by the Nazis, actually presented to Adolf Hitler and actually now sits in a museum in Vienna?

I'm sure more will come, but that's enough for now I think! Enjoy!

So you couldn't make it to the big Mixnmojo get together meeting. But there’s no need to cry too hard, because at least you've got a jolly article to read about everything you've missed.

Just be sure to come next year!

The Truth Will Be Revealed... Soon.

Last chance to send in your thoughts on Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders! Post them here... before it's too late!

(say that headline like this)

Okay, there have been a few scraps of news floating about the internet over the weekend, but we couldn't report on them because we were dead. Now we're freshly unearthed, let's get up to speed:

• Deck13 Interactive have released an English demo for Jack Keane, their next adventure after Ankh (the LucasArts-inspired game that Telltale helped out with and we cruelly overlooked). It seems to be a cross between Indiana Jones and Monkey Island, and if they pull that off it'll surely be great. The game's due out March 7th in Europe and April in the US, and Mojo will review it this time. Honest. Oh, and if their website is a bit slow, get the demo here instead.
  
• As jp-30 helpfully pointed out on our Lego Indiana Jones forum thread, there's a new preview for the game at MTV.com. You can play the Raiders monkey in the DS version!
  
• And if you want to keep track of all the Lego Indy previews to date, IndyJones.net now has a very nice Previews page, part of a massive update to the site I've started. I'll do a proper news post here when they're finished.
  
• Liked the Indy Trailer but thought it could be more old-school? This fan trailer's worth a look!

Anyone else got any others?

Man, that was a bit alarming. If you visited Mojo during the weekend you probably noticed that everything was very much broken. This was down to Mojo moving to a new dedicated server, which is much faster and should allow even more years of slowly taking over the web (or cheating death).

This might be a good time to remind you that Mojo has historically had a great hosted site community (see menu), and that if anyone's interested in becoming part of it with an intriguing site related to Mojo's target audience you're welcome to get in touch with us!

What is Mojo's target audience, you ask? Well, that's become somewhat muddy over the years. But our title sums it up pretty well:

"LucasArts, Telltale Games, Double Fine, Autumn Moon news, and more!

Recent additions to our hosted site community include the superb Pumpkin Post, and the Monkey Island Wiki.

Resources are essentially as much as you need, seeing as our bandwidth figures run into the terabytes. Exposure is guaranteed, thanks to the links you'll receive from our network of sites and access to the community headlines on Mojo's front page. Most importantly though, you get to help make Mojo the best community for fans of LucasArts and games developed by the guys who worked there!

You can get in touch with me if you're interested.

It's Mojo's time of the month again - we need your thoughts on the next classic adventure game for use in our "Secret History of LucasArts Part Two" article. The question is, are you cool enough? Have your thoughts about Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders immortalized in our acclaimed article series, which critics are already touting as "more enjoyable than triple-bypass surgery," simply by sending them in before the month is over.

So grab your CashCard and be the tabloid reporter you never secretly wished you were in the "futuristic" year 1997 by revisiting Zak McKracken with Mojo. Plz?

Want to get your site advertised on the main page of Mix'n'mojo? For FREE?

Just e-mail me in the next week with a link to your site, and if said site fills the criteria you will be added to The List. All the sites on The List will then be given a banner at the top of this page, advertised according to the chronology of The List.

What are these magical criteria? It's nothing special. All we want are sites that are LucasArts+ related. Here are a few examples of sites we mean by that:

• A Double Fan news blog!
• A Loom fan-game homepage!
• A Dominic Armato stalk pad!
• An adventure game fan-site that also covers Telltale's games!

...basically, if we cover it here, and it's on your site, then you can join The List. If in doubt, e-mail me with your site anyway and I'll get back to you. Mojo hosted sites and other LFNetwork sites can also join in on this.

Hopefully this way we'll give some more coverage to fan-sites already affiliated with Mojo, as well as making friends with some new sites.

Pardon the mess... it's all those brain donors.

If you were to click here or look over to the right you will see the thing we at Mojo have been dying to show you for about a month now - some awesome art by Dan Lee! While that in itself is really enough to cover us for any new content for at least a year or so, we decided to make an article to go along with the art - the promised Maniac Mansion extravaganza that kicks off Mojo's new articles series, "LucasArts' Secret History."

The article contains a brand-spanking new review for the game, as well as some hopefully time-wasting bonus material we were able to scrounge up. Hope you guys like it! And remember, we'll be doing this for every LucasArts adventure game down the line on a (probably) monthly basis. Think of it as episodic articles - we're just like Telltale, only more furry and less 3D.

Next month we'll be doing Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, and like last time I encourage all of you to prepare by playing the game again, or for the first time. C'mon, you get to shred a goldfish in a garbage disposal. What kind of fool wouldn't want to play a game that let's you do that?

If any of you want to share your opinions about Maniac Mansion for inclusion in our upcoming article, you're running out of time. Send me your stuff already; you have until the end of the week. Also, as I recommended last time, replay Maniac Mansion. It's only like 650kb so it should be a pretty convenient download purchase off of ebay. Stay tuned for the article in the coming weeks!

Throughout the year Mojo is going to be doing articles that look back on each of the classic LucasArts adventure games. We will be writing new reviews for each title as well as tossing in whatever miscellaneous nonsense it takes to give you, the loyal reader, the high level of quality you don't pay for. Think of it as the 25 year anniversary LucasArts forgot to celebrate.

Naturally, we'll be starting with Maniac Mansion, and we want some thoughts from you to include in the article. What's that? You haven't played the game in years or, gasp, not at all? Why not revisit this classic along with us, and send us your comments/rants/reflections about the game that started it all. Your submissions can be negative, positive, or completely irrelevant; just send them over to jharang@gmail.com, or alternatively click my name above and mail me that way. (Yes, that actually works! I was surprised too.)

You have until the 31st. Get cracking!

Update: Oh, you don't have it in your games collection? Or the graphics hurt your eyes? No matter, go here to download the fabled Maniac Mansion remake. Enjoy!

I hope that you all had a good 2007, and best of luck for 2008.

I've put up some scattered thoughts about the last year, as well as wishes for next year, and the results of our reader polls.

I hope you'll stick with us in 2008.

Onwards!