It seems the Day after Day of the Tentacle web comic is not dead and has recently been updated with another comic. (And on a side note, no, Maniac Zombies is doing just fine.) Michael Nusair has now made his 80th DOTT fan-comic and they’ve been a treat to read. Whenever he posts a new comic, he never puts the title with it, so I have to make one up when I put it in the viewer on the right. (I guess I could just email him…), but in any case, my title for the second-to-latest one is incorrect. To find out the sweet pun, you’ll just have to check out his archive on his site…. or wait until I’ve edited and uploaded the new DaDOTT viewer.

On more sadder and unexpected news, World of Monkey Island, the MI fan-site that hosted the videos I shot of the Monkey Island play, has decided to hibernate. I mean, when The Scumm Bar went into hibernation, it rocked the community, but to see WMI go, wow, that rocked me. I am glad to see that Mojo has stepped up in transforming the site into further showing that it is more than just [ex]LucasArts games oriented.

Dr. Ed Edison has been futzing around with the “Day After the DOTT” viewer over to the right and sometimes clicking around through the comics, you’ll lose the ability to scroll. I’m having Benjamin Franklin look into it.

There will be minor changes around the site that will be silently rolled out. I hope information that you want is around. Within the long downtime I have been supplied with many emails with additional information related to all of the games covered here at MZ, and I will be posting those, along with due credit, shortly.

Thanks again to all that come to ManiacZombies. I hope you like the new look.

Alright, so I hadn’t gotten to get a Wii-joke on the net yet, so sue me for taking so long. Good news, though, because it sure does look like Zombies Ate My Neighbors is coming to the Nintendo Wii’s Virtual Console with ZAMN getting an ESRB rating. No confirmation has been made by either Konami or LucasArts at this time, but it is most likely coming before the end of this year.

And if you can’t wait to play a Zombies game, the recently released “Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia”, which I’ve mentioned several times here, certainly does have the simliar taste of ZAMN, and I’ve been having a blast with it.

Thanks to Cid Dral for the news submission.

Just know that I am diligently working on taking Maniac Zombies to “LEVEL 3″ when I can in my spare time. I have high hopes for what I want the new style to look like and hopefully can have it go live with updates someday before the new year.

Oh, and the point of the headline is that there is work going on behind-the-scenes, such as implementing a new cursor to relate back to the good old days, yet, Firefox is adamant against custom cursors no matter what I’ve tried, so I suppose this site is more optimized now for IE6.

I apologize for the long break between updates. I have been hard at work at giving this site a redesign, but things haven’t been working as I wanted them to. I still have more work to do, so I will continue to update this news page until I can get things resolved. I probably won’t be updating sub-pages, such as the fan art comics page with updates with news of new comics, for instance, these:

ZAMN fan, Rolo, was very kind to ManiacZombies by submitting the first of what we hope to be many ZAMN comics in a new art style. Please do enjoy and feel free to leave any comments to show the love.

As for news on the other ZAMN comic, I haven’t gotten an update recently, so to keep with the news updates I will make the translations on the last set of pages I currently have and hopefully we’ll have more comics before we know it.

I have acquired more fan art that is ZAMN related, but I feel that it will have to wait until the site re-design is in affect. So, it will be the possible, and hopeful, next update.

With the recent game “Dead Rising” currently gaining so much popularity in the gaming world, IGN has prepared a Top 10 list of Best Zombie games which remind us of the reason we play zombies games, and our beloved Zombies Ate My Neighbors made the list, which it truly deserves. There was some fighting as to how a game that was just released could hit number one, but then again, it’s not the “Best Zombie game of all time!” list, but a list that reminds us of what Zombies games are made for and why we play them.

10. Hunter: The Reckoning
9. Stubbs the Zombie
8. Alone in the Dark
7. House of the Dead 4
6. They Hunger
5. Typing of the Dead
4. Zombies Ate My Neighbors
3. Doom
2. Resident Evil 2
1. Dead Rising

And I believe I may have forgotten before to mention a future zombie-killing game that is upcoming for the XBOX 360. Monster Madness. It may not be the ZAMN game that we want to come out for XBox Live Arcade, but it will be a game release that plays in many of the same ways that worked for ZAMN, so long ago. Only this time, it will be four-player.

Speaking of ZAMN on XBox Live Aracde, ZAMN was mentioned twice by listeners feedback to a question posed by the Xbox Magazine podcast, on what games you would like to see on XBox Live Aracde. Of the emails read, ZAMN was the only one to get more than one mention.

And don’t miss the DOTT news post below.

A 3D modeler, frankitu, created and displayed the mansion lobby and of several DOTT characters a couple months back. It sure looks pretty. The soft shading really works well.

Blatantly stolen again from MixnMojo.com

Here is a Norwegian DOTT fan, Dante, that shows the step-by-step process to creating your own DOTT-inspired background, err, I mean wall mural. Enough with the “funny”. Here are the awe-inspiring pictures.

Here is the link to see the whole thing in action. Apparently he is a reporter for a well-respected Norwegian newspaper and updates his blog with images of his other designed house-hold objects. He also is a Monkey Island fan, so now that the adventure fans of the world are growing up and getting jobs we can get more adventure-game related news and artwork. Hooray!

An update to the page makes mention that Dave Grossman and other DOTT creators may have seen the page, and if so I would really like to hear their impressions of it. I’m sure it would be nice compliments. If it were LucasArts, they would claim ownership of the wall.

Update* Here’s a comment from Dave Grossman:
Hey, that looks great!
When I was a teenager I used to paint comic book characters on my wall using a similar method.
I can’t wait to see what you do with the other three walls and the ceiling.

Someone at Telltale Games sent me a link to the DOTT wall, which I thought was pretty cool. I attempted to comment (and did so twice because the alert message that popped up was in Norwegian so I had no idea what it said!). I think one of the best things about the Web is that if you put something like that up, the likelihood of the people who wrote the game getting wind of it is actually pretty high….

Anyway, keep up the good work.
-Dave

Blatantly stolen from MixnMojo.com

Is TellTaleGames acquiring Day of the Tentacle to create their own sequels/spin-offs? Well, not just yet, but it’s possible. According to MixnMojo, who according to GameInformer, who according to Dan Conners himself suggests that there may have been talks in the past and continuing efforts being bade my TellTale to acquire the rights to license the old favorites from LucasArts and have them created and possibly distributed by TellTaleGames, and just have LucasArts be the one to bring the franchise.

GI: A lot of those LucasArts franchises are still very popular – you spoke about Day of the Tentacle. Is there a chance you’ll be able to wrangle a few more of those away for more episodes? Are you working on that at all?

Connors: It’s definitely on our minds and it’s definitely something we think about. Maybe I can give you more information a while from now. It’s definitely something that makes good sense to everybody. For them it’s the same thing. For them it’s “What’s the business model? What’s the retail model?” It’s not their type of game – it’s not Star Wars, it’s not with the movie, with the lightsaber – an action game. When trying to do the two things at the same time it makes it challenging. They’ve been trying to figure out the right solution, and hopefully Telltale is part of it.

To me this idea sounds just brilliant and hopefully TellTale still has some friends in high and mighty places over at LucasArts to sway the ideas in their favor, and well, in everyones favor.

And for anyone who is a fan of TellTale, the GameInformer article is quite a good read.

You may remember from DOTT that Hoagie had some quite interesting ideas for a re-designed U.S. Flag.

-We need a babe in a leather bikini, swinging a broadaxe.
-Could it have a chrome-plated bald eagle robot on it?
-How about a skull with, like, scorpions in its mouth?
-The guys downstairs say they want a big family crest… …and in the four corners, they want a keg, some babes, a guitar, and some drum sticks… …and underneath it all put, ‘America ROCKS!’
-What if it had the face of the Devil on it, with like red, white and blue flames coming out of his mouth?

Well, while over on a trip through northern Germany, known as one of the last adventure game-loving countries left, my group was greeted once with this U.S.A. flag.