A Bugged Fate

Being the bearer of bad news is never fun, but we do finally have to report that nothing has changed since Mixnmojo learned, last February, that Crackpot Entertainment had lost their publisher for the still unreleased second part of Insecticide. The website reported that Crackpot was considering distributing cutscenes from the second episode on Youtube “in an attempt to complete the story as best they can in lieu of the actual game”, but so far only videos from the first episode have been uploaded.

Insecticide PC Cover
Insecticide PC Cover

SouthPeak Games’ Rob Burman confirmed earlier today that Insecticide has indeed not been added to their “line-up of titles”, and Crackpot president Michael Levine did not have anything further to add to the situation (apart from a plug for Planet Cazmo). Gawrsh.

This is a very unfortunate time indeed to advertise a verbose, sibylline review for a two-part game that might never be properly concluded, but perhaps some hilarity can be found in-between the lines, especially since the review was written back when Tales of Monkey Island was still just a collective wet dream (…or a headline in someone’s secret legal papers) and LucasArts seemed to have forever abandoned their roots.

You can read the anachronism here – in the meantime, let’s keep our fingers crossed for Crackpot!

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Insecticide Review

Over the course of the last few months we’ve found ourselves marvelling how very little press (apart from a slew of niche sites we frequent) and attention Crackpot Entertainment’s Insecticide has garnered.

insecticide_01
Talk Talk

The developers, after all, consist of several nigh-luminaries of yore, responsible for much of the heyday of LucasArts Entertainment Company: Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, that sort of stuff, and with LEC now a mere shadow of its former shelf, we might quite possibly have our next best thing in the form of Insecticide.

Here’s hoping the absence of press is not a prophetic sign, as Crackpot was solely founded with the intention of developing this film noir -tinged “bi-sodic” bugfest: In a GamaSutra interview, developer Larry Ahern indeed notes that Crackpot currently has no other products in the pipeline.

The game then! What we have here is an action-adventure – 50/50 split – and seen from the 3rd person perspective, over the small shoulders of the streetsmart rookie bug-cop Chrys Liszt and narrated by the hard-boiled sleuth Roachy Caruthers. The partners are called in to investigate a murder at the Nectarola Soft Drink Company – a corporation that has an exhaustive monopoly over the city’s soft drink manufacture. As the mystery begins to unravel, these hard-shelled investigators delve deeper and deeper into the seething underbelly of the city of Troi.

(more…)

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