Udvarnoky

I fixed all the broken links in the Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix article caused by the fact that Aric Wilmunder, who hosted the design documents, let his domain expire. I've noticed that this snapshot of his site seems to have functional PDF links to all the docs he'd uploaded before abandoning the effort: https://web.archive.org/web/20171216013851/http://www.wilmunder.com/Arics_World/Games.html

For the record, the U.S. version of Psychonauts did not require you to swap discs after installation. That would have been outrageous, leaving me with no choice but to mail a letter so mean that Tim would still be recovering from it. I think the game might have required you to keep Disc One in the drive while playing, but if so that was for asinine copy-protection reasons rather than anything needing to be read off it.

I presume they are only de-aging him for a flashback sequence, but that he will be playing his own age for the majority of the story that's set in 1969 or whatever. The horror scenario I had in mind was quite a bit more far ranging.

It seems like the more pessimistic reports were true and that production has been more or less suspended since Ford injured his shoulder in late June. They did proceed without him for that much-publicized Glasgow shoot, but maybe that booking would have been particularly difficult to break and they decided to go ahead and get coverage of the wide shots and stuntwork for that sequence. In a way I'm relieved, because this suggests we aren't going to be subjected to some pioneering experiment in grafting Ford's performance onto a stand-in for the duration of the movie or some other CGI horror along those lines. Allegedly filming finally resumes sometime next month, and let's hope it's without further incident.

I still fondly remember installing my PC version of Psychonauts with five, count 'em five, CDs. That nonsense was exclusive to the U.S., I guess because some smart-alecks showed Majesco a study that claimed a significant number of domestic consumers didn't yet have a DVD-ROM drive. I find it highly dubious that anybody with the specs to run that game in 2005 didn't almost by definition have a DVD-ROM, but I enioyed the unintentional throwback to the diskette days all the same.

You may want to experiment with running CMI in compatibility mode in addition to following all of Benny's steps.

Okay, I got the latest dev build and sure enough, iMUSE sounds like it's working as it should in CMI. That makes me happy. There should be some sort of PSA for people who are buying CMI that they ought to get the latest ScummVM binary, because whatever build the game comes bundled with when purchased off GOG/Steam is probably falling short.

@ATMachineYeah the ScummVM project is...known for that. I don't want to rag too much on ScummVM because Lord knows it's been a godsend for as long as it has existed. You can't beat it for convenience or for the ability to play various wacky versions of titles that you may find yourself for totally innocent reasons not happening to possess the executable (or maybe even the platform) for. But I think the quiet disregard of the native interpreters over time poses an archival issue. I have mixed feelings because there was a time when I would have considered it a pipe dream to have all the LucasArts SCUMM games officially available again. And now, here we are: they're all easily obtainable from GOG and Steam...bundled with ScummVM.* Which I don't object to, as it's free and a great way to ensure every game "just works" out the box for roughly every end user imaginable. But because ScummVM functionally replaces those EXEs, it seems Lucasfilm saw no need to toss it in with the data files while they were at it. Luckily, Archive.org is surprisingly well stocked in this regard, but it's kind of sad that even with the games legally available, people are still left to turn to Warez sites if they want to pursue the option of running the games exactly as they did when they shipped. Or, worse, they have to put down the cheese popcorn in order to walk to their closet and disinter their old bit-rotting floppies. *I believe the Steam versions of Indy3, Indy4, Full Throttle and The Dig may use the upgrades executables Aaron Giles made at LucasArts circa 2002, which is cool. Shame LEC didn't spend the extra five cents to do all the games...unless they did and just never cared enough to put them out.

Anyone should feel free to check my work on this. I did a comparison this morning but between different versions of ScummVM and different hardware setups, who knows. I have no memory of ScummVM ever being able to do this quite right, though.

It also let you configure your sound boards! Which may have resulted in nothing more than appending an "s", an "a", or an "i" as an argument to the EXE, but consider the cultural losses of denying modern players this screen.

Was he able to fold those into the codebase? The issue persists for me but I don't know that I have the latest and greatest ScummVM either.

What with recent talk about CMI's music implementation being iffy in ScummVM, I thought it might be worth trying to compile some of the known behavioral differences in the SCUMM games when comparing the original executable (as run in an emulator like DOSBox or, for you nuts out there, an actual old IBM or Amiga) to ScummVM's interpretation. I'm doing this mainly for my own benefit, as I get the impression certain folks are aware of more discrepancies than I am, but I'll kick things off with some that I know about: - Most obviously, ScummVM does not reproduce the original UI for things like pause state, "Are you sure you want to quit?" and Save/Load menus. In several of the games, the save menus were pretty generic, but Maniac Mansion for example gave you a unique image (Syd running away from Green Tentacle in v1, Green Tentacle's band jamming out in v2), and Last Crusade had a graphic representation of your IQ score. - In Maniac Mansion, saving was not allowed once you reached Dr. Fred's lab. Hitting F5 at that point brought up this text: "The Meteor has control of your computer and he won't let you save the game." Last Crusade similarly wouldn't let you save once you hit the Grail Temple, as an in-game sign warns. ScummVM lets you freely save your state in these final sequences. - Starting I think with Hit the Road, the games shipped with custom launchers that ScummVM bypasses. Unlike the creepy teal/purple one for configuring sound on Fate of Atlantis and Day of the Tentacle, these GUIs were visually designed in the flavor of the game. - Maniac Mansion NES is rather graphically glitchy, most noticeably when characters climb thin air instead of the stairs to the third floor landing. ScummVM also makes it so that the steel security door is always open as it is in the PC versions. That is done to bypass the copy protection - a "crack" which became part of the official executable when bundled with DOTT - but there was never copy protection in the NES version. The security door was simply unlocked. - CMI's iMUSE isn't faithfully replicated in ScummVM. It appears that local hero AndywinXp corrected this within the last year. Note that folks who purchased CMI off of GOG/Steam will probably need to grab the latest dev build of ScummVM, as the version that comes bundled with the game almost surely predates the merge of this fix.

CMI's implementation of iMUSE doesn't seem to be fully functional in ScummVM. The best locations to conduct a comparison would be the Barbery Coast and the Goodsoup Hotel. The original interpreter transitions between the themes smoothly, while ScummVM abruptly jumps from one to the other.

Authentic iMUSE lives.

I'd like to see some off the wall stuff. Defenders of Dynatron City reprint with an issue of the comic and VHS of the failed pilot, anyone?

Seeing as they've done Monkey Island, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, and Sam & Max*, it's clear that LRG is willing to put their licensing agreement with Lucasfilm to more use than re-releasing Star Wars games. Assuming the love for the boutique IP continues and considering LRG seems to emphasize console titles, what games from the LucasArts catalog do you most hope to get a novelty re-release? As I've probably made clear several times, the NES version of Maniac Mansion is at the top of my list. A reprint of the N64 version of Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine (which was a Blockbuster-exclusive cartridge) would be a pretty cool idea as well. What's your pitch? *Okay, admittedly Save the World is not a LucasArts game, but still.

While we wait for Mojo's review (courtesy of ThunderPeel), I'm curious if anybody else got a chance to play this yet. I'm sure those of us without one of those extortionate Facebook helmets would be interested in local impressions.

Noteworthy that as with the Nintendo Power preview, these screenshots are pre-censorship. You have to squint to make it out, but there's the "For a good time, call Edna" graffiti on the shower wall, and Ed's dialog about Fred having not "eaten" in years. Good find!

I dunno how one gauges these things, but I've always gotten the sense that it was a fairly beloved cult classic of the 16-bit era. At any rate the Limited Run Games business model seems to be based on retroactively creating the supply (manufacturing a specific number of units) after accurately measuring the demand (taking all orders in a closed period before going into a one-time production cycle), so I suspect it's all budgeted in such a way as to always be profitable - albeit at what I imagine to be razor-thin margins - regardless of how much demand there ends up being. They've done way more obscure stuff than Zombies, anyway. Heck, Monkey Island might well be less mainstream than Zombies, who really knows.

Jeepers. https://mixnmojo.com/news/Zombies-Ate-My-Retirement-Fund

Lucasfilm owns the IP itself, so that's what Disney inherited when it acquired the studio. Paramount's distribution rights go back to the original deal George Lucas made with Michael Eisner (then at Paramount) back in 1979. Pretty much every studio turned down Raiders when Lucas shopped it around, and a stumbling block was that they simply didn't believe that Lucas could produce the film for $20 million he claimed he could. The script read like an expensive epic, and Spielberg had a reputation for going overbudget before Raiders. Lucas and Spielberg were committed to deliver under the promised budget as part of the deliberately "down and dirty," television-like schedule they intended to shoot Raiders on, but it was probably hard to imagine on a financier's part. In the end Paramount agreed to finance the movie on the condition of major penalties if it went overbudget as well as perpetual distribution rights to the movie and any sequels. That means that when Disney acquired Lucasfilm over thirty years later, they weren't even left with the rights to distribute a fifth Indy. About a year later Disney cut a deal with Paramount to secure the distribution rights to future films, with Paramount retaining the rights to the original four and still getting some sort of financial participation on what comes after. You gotta hand it to Eisner -- that deal he made has been a license to print money for Paramount for 40 years.

Paramount is still getting some kind of financial participation in Indy 5, so even though their involvement in this movie is merely clerical, I could see the mountain logo getting appended after the Disney and Lucasfilm logos for the sake of tradition.

There is no guarantee of a five film set, as Paramount owns the distribution rights to the first four movies in perpetuity while Disney owns them for the fifth film and whatever unholy works they make with the brand thereafter. It's theoretically possible that Disney will eventually drop a big sack of money on Paramount to get those rights (they actually had to do that in the first place just to control Indy 5), but I don't see Paramount being in any hurry to sell them.

It's nice to see it dechlorinated, but the nets and Classic Softs and whatever other physical filters used when shooting the movie is what gives it that gauzy look with all the halation, so that's baked in forever. I am still looking forward to giving it a watch with a less hideous color grade, though. And it's clear that starting over from a 4K scan has yielded up more detail from the 35mm source. The trilogy upgrades are more significant, but it's clear Skull got some real benefits here. Also, is this the first time in history that revisionist color grading is seen as a good thing?

It's disappointing, but perhaps will be limited to a prologue setting up Mikkelsen's villain or something? Unless they're going full The Godfather Part II and will repeatedly swap back to WWII. The rumor is that the movie is being shot digitally, which is a first for the franchise. It will be a shame when Mangold and Papamichael inevitably deliver something more "filmic" than Spielberg and Kaminski did with the 35mm-shot Crystal Skull.