The International House of Mojo

As we stare down the not so unwelcoming maw of Psychonauts 2, I’m feeling a little wistful about that magical period right before the original Psychonauts came out. Who could forget the (very) short-lived Psychonauts web comic by Scott Campbell hosted on the goofy, Flash-powered Majesco site, or the unspeakable dilemma of whether to go in for the EB Games versus the Gamestop pre-order bonus, or Tim pimping Thrik’s fan site (14:00) on camera, or those voyeuristic glimpses of the boozy wrap party, or the MTV Sharts?

Perhaps the highlight of the victory lap was the launch of the Double Fine Company Store, which sold more than the standard issue cheap schwag – it sold floaty pens.

Alas, the world was simpler then. It was before Double Fine hired on Spaff, who since used his Machiavellian influence to convince Tim to retire the company store and sell out to The Man. In short, you’ll be getting your Psychonauts 2 wares from the Xbox Gear Shop:

Still, there’s some neat merchandise there. And while your credit card is being processed, you’ll want to check out this launch video and Episode 6 of Basic Braining, “Pins and Upgrades”:

There's no time to celebrate the ambush return of jp-30, because Spaff keeps cranking these marketing videos out to ensure that Psychonauts 2 supercedes your own family as a presence in your life. The subject this time: Enemies.

The Censors are back in more variations than before, but Psychonauts 2 will also pit Raz against new mental foes known as Regrets, Doubts, The Judge, Enablers, Bad Moods, Bad Ideas and Panic Attacks. And just what are these hostiles all about? That's where watching this video comes in.

If you're looking at all the Psychonauts related deals and wishing for a bit more merchandise, you could go the route of Titolian and just build your own out of LEGO bricks.

Raz by Titolian, on Flickr

Source: flickr

Figments, Emotional Baggage, Memory Vaults and PSI Challenge Markers make their court-mandated return in Psychonauts 2 (occasionally with enhancement), but what of the sequel's all-new collectible items that you've been hearing so much about in the hippest political clubs and Parisian coffee houses? The answers to that question and more can be streamed with prejudice below.

With Psychonauts 2 just days away, the original game and its VR sequel, In the Rhombus of Ruin, are a whopping 90% off on Steam. We don't highlight sales often anymore, but In the Rhombus of Ruin has never dropped this low. Psychiatric action adventures hooo!

Source: Steam

Did you know that in Psychonauts 2 Raz will be getting some nifty gizmos courtesy of Otto Mentallis, a lead engineer and founding member of the Psychonauts? Well, you will after watching this video.

Having brought overwrought mayhem and blunt-force bewilderment to the Oculus Quest community, the next stop for Sam & Max: This Time It's Virtual is SteamVR, which is good news for people who think that the torrid cost of a headset is barrier enough without forcing Facebook enrollment on top of it. It sounds like this version of the game will expand its audience to owners of the HTC Vive or Valve Index headsets, and I'm quite sure those are recognizable words to people who know things.

You heard the tweet. Head over to Steam to grab your demo, and have a thought for us lowborn who can't afford the virtual world by telling us how it is.

Source: Big Sugar

(Quoth the Benzo.)

Some of you may remember the cannon shoot-out scene at the beginning of The Curse of Monkey Island on a sliding scale of enthusiasm. Those of you on the :D end of said spectrum may also remember that the farthest turret cannot be destroyed when playing the sequence in ScummVM. Well, fret no more! According to Andy over at GitHub:

And so he fixed it – the magic that one pixel can do.

I have no idea if it actually will be part of a ScummVM release or not, because good god, it’s GitHub, and I can’t spend the precious few moments of my life reading through it. But there it is! Sound off in the comments about everything I surely missed.

The next Psychonauts 2 preview video is out, and this one concerns Raz's repertoire of psychic powers. After recapping the arsenal that Raz will be carrying over from the first game, we are introduced to three new ones: Mental Connection (which looks very hookshot-esque), Time Bubble (which appears to stun enemies and moving objects), and Mental Projection -- an ability by Raz to produce a paper "archetype" of himself voiced by Rikki Simons (GIR from Invader Zim) who can aid in battles and be dispatched through thin openings. He also may tend to fray Raz's nerves.

Sam & Max Save the World is back on the Xbox, this time for the One/Series-Whatever incarnations. It’ll run you a cent under $20. That’s about all I got – I’m sure the version is good, though! Let’s just cap it off with a trailer.

Game musician extraordinaire George "The Fat Man" Sanger, whose work can be heard in such titles as Maniac Mansion (NES), Loom, The 7th Guest, Wing Commander, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Outlaws, and a whole mess of Humongous stuff, fielded questions from Arcade Attack in extravagant video form. Reading off pre-written questions, the prolific frontman of Team Fat guides you through his long career all the way from his first Intellivision project.

It's possible that Sanger did a similar Q&A for Mojo almost a year ago as part of an article that for political reasons remains mired in a publication-palsying thicket of legal capework, shifting redactions and moral grandstanding, but hopefully we can speak of that in something other than innuendo before the year's out.

The unenthusiastically remembered Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings spawned an unreleased novelization (background here) that is now being unveiled by its author, Rob MacGregor, in audio form. There’s even a trailer with the details.

Double Fine seeks to keep you restless these remaining weeks before the release of Psychonauts 2 by drip-feeding you a series of preview videos dubbed Basic Braining. The first installment below introduces the interns of the Motherlobe, who include Dogen Boole’s pancake-eating sister.

Meanwhile, if you’re a backer of the original Psychonauts 2 Fig campaign, you’ll have received an email cowritten by some poor dope named Spaff which details the various ways you can redeem your copy of the game, depending on what level you pledged at and which…opts…you opted for.

I’m just guessing here, but if you’re someone who reads this site at all, you probably have a high opinion of your LucasArts knowledge. You know which versions of The Secret of Monkey Island are missing the Disk 22 gag; you’re capable of following a reference Remi might make to an Amiga-exclusive background prop in Woodtick; you compulsively offer to sell your first dates fine leather jackets as a secret handshake to weed out the rejects; you’d recognize a panel from the Defenders of Dynatron City comic; you could spot Jenny Sward dialog in Loom amidst Orson Scott Card’s lines at five hundred yards.

You’ve maintained the fan sites, solved the Three Paths, witnessed the death of Cobb, memorized the code wheel combos, chose DOSBox over ScummVM, made a fool of yourself in front of Dom on IRC in 1999…You know everything there is to know, dadgummit. So if there was something exceptionally outrageous to be exposed about 1990s LucasArts adventure artisans – like, for example, that they made an objectively insane, sketch-based local television show after hours – that would hardly be news to you, now would it?

To that, Mojo paternally brays the following rejoinder: “Hold my grog.”

Discover the tale of Fiction by Louie – five episodes worth of public access mayhem that Dave Grossman, Dan Connors, and other folks you would know slapped together, aired to the unsuspecting insomniacs of Marin County in 1996-2000, and then quietly moved on from, secure in the knowledge that no one would ever discover their dirty secret decades after the crime. But they didn’t count on our crack team of Ronan Farrow-esque journalists, and today the truth becomes the public’s business.

Our sincerest thanks to Jesse Clark, Dave Grossman, Dan Connors, Mark Cartwright and John Hannon for making this article possible with their generous donation of memories and artifacts.

Congratulations are in order for Double Fine, as Psychonauts 2 has gone gold (that is, development is finished and the game is under glass), and you can go ahead and treat that August 25th release date as scripture.

You might as well keep that Psychonauts 2 high going by checking out VentureBeat’s recent interview with senior systems designer Lauren Scott and lead environment artist Geoff Soulis. And when you’re through with that…well, you’re probably on your own at that point. Nevertheless: Psychonauts 2!

The high priests who maintain the Genesis Temple sat down with artist/designer Larry Ahern for six months to discuss his decades-spanning career. Getting the interview down on paper apparently required a scope akin to The Human Condition, because they’ve only published one of two parts.

But that first half takes us from the beginning of Larry’s career all the way through The Curse of Monkey Island. A number of good working-at-LucasArts-in-the-nineties anecdotes are shared from Larry’s experiences on Monkey Island 2, Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle, and we even get a few extra details on that scrapped prologue for The Curse of Monkey Island, which among other things would have seen the return of the Voodoo Priest of LeChuck’s Fortress.

The second part promises tales from Larry’s final years at LucasArts, including at least one collapsed version of Full Throttle 2, as well as the misadventures of Insecticide. Look for it whenever the intermission ends.

Source: Genesis Temple

If you were hoping for a way to play Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis that requires a subscription, isn't DRM-free and supports Jeff Bezos, then today is your lucky day.

Joining the ranks of the Monkey Island special editions, Fate of Atlantis is now available via Prime Gaming, a revolutionary new service from Amazon that lets you register yet another app for doing the same thing you can do elsewhere, less conveniently. Go ahead and pinch yourself. This is really happening.

Source: PC Games N

Though Peter McConnell failed to honor the sacred tradition of giving Mojo sneak peek MP3s for a Psychonauts game, we don’t hold grudges around here, which is why we remain deliriously excited about his score for Psychonauts 2, a game which comes out later this month, for goodness sake.

And being above pettiness is really primed to pay off for us, because this score promises to be amazing, with sky-high production values. You can hear that for yourself by listening to a preview of six minutes from the soundtrack, embedded below, which Double Fine and McConnell have presented via Spin instead of us.* It's unreasonably awesome.

*And we have no problem with that.

Source: Spin

And it’s about time, I say! It seems the 78th Venice International Film Festival will be including Sam & Max: This Time It’s Virtual as part of the VR line-up. The unexpected occasion is being used to unveil Steve Purcell’s majestic cover art for the game:

Thanks, Venice!