The International House of Mojo

I’m not sure why you’d look for the latest Indiana Jones and the Great Circle news here on the front page when the forum coverage by “Threepwood4life” is far more dependable, but perhaps the time has come to play catch-up, if only to keep up appearances and maintain our eligibility for government subsidies. (Footnote: We respect your outrage, but maybe now you’ll read those amendments to the end before you pull the lever.)

The last non-LEGO Indy title back in 2009 was, shall we say, a furtive affair, and I think we’re starting to bear witness to what unrelieved repression ultimately leads to. Wanting to project a show of force in marketing gimmick game, Microsoft is offering up an exclusive, Indy-themed Xbox Series X console to the lucky few who want that thing in their home. What you do is haul yourself over to one of three metropolitan hubs (London, Sydney, and New York) starting November 12th. At these “Microsoft Experience Centers” you will find an Indy display that will challenge your ego with some sort of puzzle. Use your background in adventure games to solve it, and you’ve done and gone and entered for your chance to win. It’s all terribly cute. Full details of the sweepstakes are here, and below is a look at the hardware you’ll be publicly debasing yourself for:

Not exhibitionist enough for you? Then try on for size the four-wheeled promotional consideration the game will be enjoying at the Circuit of the Americas racetrack in Austin this weekend:

Somewhere in all of this you might have maintained some curiosity about the game itself. As we are drawing closer to release, more hands-on impressions are fixing to emerge. Fans are already photo-journaling extravagant Great Circle events that Bethesda is putting on, and word is that we can expect previews to turn up before the month’s out.

Indiana Jones and the Middling Parallelogram releases December 9, 2024 on the Xbox Series S|X and on PC, with a Playstation 5 version to follow in 2025.

I mean, not in the classic sense, but rather that we’ve added another section to MojoDB Preview Edition: Cover Art. Frankly, LucasArts Posters is where you want to go for high-quality scans (Footnote: thx jan!), but then, do you really want to forego browsing classic artworks like this?

That’s the kind of bespoke content you can only find at MojoDB, your friend in LucasArts+ covers.

Remi must have missed this interview with Dan Connors and Jonathon Sgro of Skunkape Games last week, and it’s too bad, because it’s quite good. Most of the discussion focuses on what went into the development of the Sam & Max remasters, including throwing Jake under the bus at one point. But if I know you, you probably want to know what they said about The Future™:

Well, that all sounds rather definitively…ambiguous. Check out the whole thing, and buy The Devil’s Playhouse eight more times.

Source: Time Extension

Seeing as your life quite properly consists of watching long-form video interviews with occasional interruptions to touch grass in the form of Amiga Monkey Island playthroughs (Footnote: Such allusions constitute a practice known as “Remi-baiting” on the street.) you’ll be only too happy to learn that Steve Purcell was the latest guest on Pencil to Pencil, a web series in which comic artists interview comic artists.

Purcell can trace a decent line and all, but personally I’m awaiting an interview with the visionary behind MojoComics himself, Gabez. Maybe they don’t want to frontload the obvious guests.

Special thanks to Jake for taking time out of not inviting us to Skunkape events to give us a heads up on this one.

For PC and Xbox, that is. Despite speculation that this could be a Microsoft exclusive, a Playstation version is promised for Spring 2025. Celebrate the release date announcement with this new trailer:

Source: Bethesda Softworks

And The Devil’s Playhouse keeps on rolling, this time with some updates to Benzo’s Quick & Easy software. Specifically, Telltale Explorer, Music Extractor and Speech Extractor.

Putting on his patented Mojo Cynic hat, the post caps off with, “This is a slightly bittersweet update as Devil’s Playhouse will probably be the last game ever released using the old Telltale engine.” I mean, OK, that is probably true, but one can always hope that more is on the horizon.

… we have the choice to cry into the pillow over getting old or celebrate a stellar game. And, since we finished the former, you can now reap the benefits from the latter: Enjoy yourself with these newly unearthed 2009 SCUMM Bar reviews of Tales of Monkey Island.

OK, so not the grandest of gestures, but we probably will do more, maybe. Because the game truly deserves it. Check out the Mojo review, too.

Fifteen years, seriously…

Last month saw another welcome entry in the “Lucasfilm Games Rewind” series over in the blog section of Lucasfilm.com, this one being a tribute to Loom.

It’s indeed a nice little writeup on the 1990 classic, but the irony of its devout tone might be a bit too rich for some to digest, considering that Lucasfilm only offers the VGA version of the game - drastically re-written compared to the EGA original, the artwork for which is a high water mark of the 16 color era - through Steam and GOG. It also happens to be a version of the game loathed by creator Brian Moriarty, who is solicitously quoted throughout the piece.

But some things in life just must be accepted, and we should all humble ourselves to the reality that this issue is literally impossible to address.

Source: Lucasfilm.com

Release day has come and gone, and whether you binged your way through Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse: Remastered or you’re making a point of savoring it (or you’re merely employed), the game is pretty much the only purpose your life serves at the moment. And rightly so.

While Remi’s review is really the only one you need to consider, I guess we should point out that critics everywhere are taking the necessary steps to not make fools of themselves by aggressively loving the game. Meanwhile, Skunkape has published its traditional Steam post that goes deep into exactly what they changed in their fastidious remastering efforts. Some of it May Surprise You.

Additionally, they assure that the usual sack of archival content, along with the soundtrack release you’ve all been awaiting since, oh, let’s say 2010, is forthcoming. Where the former is concerned, followers of Skunkape’s social media presence have already gotten a taste, and quite the nourishing one at that for proper connoisseurs of vintage web announcement ephemera:

Speaking of social media, I was happy to see that Chuck Jordan, whose last big contribution (his greatest to adventure games, if I might suggest?) at Telltale was The Devil's Playhouse, registered his thoughts for the occasion:

The three-years-in-the-making revamp of Telltale’s masterpiece (Footnote: Which, not to mention, marks the triumphant conclusion of a damn near five-year saga to remaster the trilogy) is what is termed in esoteric Mixnmojo parlance A Big Deal, and we can naturally be expected to keep squeezing juice out of it for weeks years an appropriate and judicious length of time to come. So get ready to relish every second of it.

They said it couldn’t be done and they were mostly right. But, this one time, you get a review on time: Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse Remastered, right here, right now.

Do we like the game? We do! And so will you, because you presumably don’t suck. Go read, just to whet your appetite.

Got your plans set for the weekend? Cancel them, as your next few days will be spent traversing Mojo’s recently resurfaced podcast archive. Forty-two nuggets of gold from 2008 through 2019.

If you follow MojoCast in your favorite podcast software, you already have the updated feed, including a dozen episodes that were, until now, lost to time. And you can, of course, find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Podcast Index, through RSS, and so on. It’s even on YouTube if that’s your jam.

As for new podcasts? You got 20-odd hours to go through as it is, stop bothering me until you’ve listened to them all. >:

You’ve read our article on the subject, sure, but as you’ve confessed to many a psychiatrist, you’ll never truly know a night’s sleep until you can hear Aric Wilmunder talk about Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix – that’s the would-be SCUMM Indy game planned after Fate of Atlantis – for four-and-a-half hours.

Well, Daniel Albu's got you covered in his latest upload. Eat well:

Source: Tech Talk with Daniel Albu

Our favourite Lucasarts game emulator DREAMM has reached another milestone. Earlier this week Aaron Giles released DREAMM 3 further cementing his place in the Mojo pantheon. (Footnote: other members include DJG and whoever made the cookchase midi)

This version adds support for a bunch more games, supports add on packs and adds an excellent CRT filter that adapts and changes to suit the video mode of the game you're playing. There's much more of course and full details can be found in the readme.

Grab it here.

Source: Our forums