The soundtrack to Full Throttle rules. At one point in the game, the radio plays a hilarious country song about a guy who loves living in the post-apocalypse.
The population is greatly decreased.
And now the odds are greatly increased,
that I may someday get a chance
to kiss your lips.
I thank the lo-o-ord each day
for the apocalypse.
Folks are mostly disfigured or dead,
but sugar, I wont let it go to my head.
My mama's face has dripped down into the dirt.
But I'm still chasin' chitlins, whiskey and skirt.
The article mentions Tim Schaefer having to tell people repeatedly that the game's setting isn't actually post-apocalyptic. I bet that song is the single reason why people assumed it was (it certainly was for me).
The song sets up the mood for sure, but I think there is a bit more to it.
The town where you (as a player) happen to crash doesn't seem to be fully populated. Maureen drops a line about people leaving, but doesn't clarify why, leaving you with assumptions. Wandering around the town you hear that song you've mentioned, that's a big one for sure. A bit later, you have to ride across a desert which isn't exactly post-apocalyptic by itself, but does radiate a certain vibe - the color palette is rather peculiar. And then you meet that cave-dwelling Cavefish biker gang which certainly doesn't help with brushing off (fairly established at this point) post-apocalyptic feel :)
Full Throttle remains one of my favorite point and click adventures ever.
I love how cinematic it is. I love the voice overs, the noir-clichè tone ("when I'm on the road I'm indestructible. No one can touch me. But they try..."). I absolutely love the soundtrack, "Legacy" is awesome and it fits the game to a tee.
I love how funny the game is, yet how emotional it can get. I love Ben and Moe as characters. I love that you cannot get stuck in this game. I love that it is about bikers.
I love that you get to say "you know what would look good on your nose? The bar!" (and push an uncooperative bartender's face to the bar). I love that Ben is a tough guy, not some helpless Roger Wilco type.
I absolutely fucking love Full Throttle.
Whenever I smell asphalt I do, indeed, think of Maureen.. and trouble.
My favourite dialog from Full Throttle comes when Ben wakes up on a table in Maureen's ramshackle hut after wrecking his bike on the highway:
Ben: Is this an authorized Corley service centre?
Maureen: Well, it's a Corley service centre, but I don't
have the official paperwork.
Ben: Ah, an *illegitimate* Corley operation.
Maureen (stiffly): I prefer to call it a *renegade*
Corley operation.
In the original context, the joke is the distance between the scrappy environment and the official-sounding language. On the second playthrough, however, it has additional context.
When I read the article, at first I was incredulous that the author would say bad things about Full Throttle, but as he listed his reasons I was like "oh yeah, that sucked, and that was terrible too, I didn't enjoy that bit at all". It's a testament to the game's thematic strength (and perhaps the power of human nostalgia) that I remember it so fondly today.
Jimmy Maher criticizes the gameplay aspects of Full Throttle, saying they pale in comparison to games like Day of the Tentacle. However, I remember Full Throttle's simplified gameplay as one of the reasons I liked it so much when I got it. It was a breath of fresh air compared to the enormously complex Day of the Tentacle. In that game, you had to control three characters at once, each with a full inventory of items (and they could exchange items!). With Full Throttle, the story held my attention the entire time and the puzzles were just difficult enough to require some thought / trial and error, but not so much that it seemed hopeless without a guide. Sure, the action segments were rough, but they were a tiny part of the game.
Whenever I think of Full Throttle, I think of movies.
Full Throttle was amazing. It was from an era of gaming where “cinematic” was a design goal. Games aspired to be movie-like because movies were the gold standard of entertainment. We even got Mark Hamill playing Ripburger in Full Throttle. At the same time, game studios were self-consciously minnows in comparison to the glitz and money and celebrity of Hollywood, and the target market skewed heavily adolescent, which often gave an excuse to strike a comedic tone in an otherwise-serious plot.
I think it’s the moments of comedy that hold Full Throttle back from getting a mainstream Hollywood adaption. Writing comedy is really, really hard, and jokes that came across as clever in the game, such as the repeated parodies of Hollywood cliches, risk translating into mere cliches on the big screen. What would Full Throttle be without the jokes? A Mad Max ripoff? And what if the jokes fall flat? Wild Hogs?
Hollywood in general struggles with comedy. You can’t write it on demand. But I’m not saying it’s impossible. The right writer could do it, and with the right script I’d even let Dwayne Johnson be Ben.
Whenever I think of Full Throttle, I think of two things: movies, and comedy.
It feels like someone reading a book of Jules Verne in 2021 and say it's more boring than watching a video on TikTok. I had a lot of fun playing it in 1995.
Have you read any of the other articles by the author? He’s basically a game historian and is extremely fair about the merits and failings of old games.
He's probably a good author and historian and I don't criticize his whole work. I just allowed myself a subjective observation because he criticized one of my favorite game.
It's completely possible to love a game that has deep flaws. There's a guy on twitch that I watch occasionally who has very different tastes than I do. I love Ocarina of Time and Outer Wilds, for instance, and he hated both. Thing is, when he lists the things he didn't like they are all perfectly legitimate complaints.
For me the magic of Full Throttle was how it gave me a glimpse into a world so different/badass/cooler than my own. Here I am, a timid 7-year-old suburban boy, watching a biker pop a wheelie and oh shit the front wheel fell off...
The critiques of the gameplay are totally fair. That minigame where you duel on the bikes was so frustrating.
People don't have as much patience as back then, IMO. There's also a huge influx of video games compared to when Full Throttle came out. I'm also not sure how accessible walkthroughs were so people had to figure out the puzzles fully.
I miss those days. I may try to replay some old adventures like Space Quest along with Full Throttle :D
I completed the remaster a year or two ago and had a great time. The temptation to look at a walkthrough when meeting a tricky puzzle is real, though. It simply ruins these type of games.
SQ4 was my first adventure game. I don't think I understood half the references when I played the first time and should reply the series at some point.
As a warning, some of the Sierra approach may seem obtuse or rough today. IIRC several of their games have actions that look like they do something, but make the game unwinnable later on, with no immediate signal or later explanation of what you did wrong.
But there is the internet for this, and they should run on several platforms via either dosbox/scummvm? The SQ collections are on sale on both gog and steam right now, around $6 for the whole series.
I loved Space Quest 4. I still remember that near the end you are at some mainframe and is has a faux Windows 3.1-like interface. I think you had to drag some stuff to the trash to free up mainframe memory. There is also a Space Quest 4 icon. If you drag it to the trash (as a 10-11 year old kid, of course you are going to try), the game quits to DOS immediately, no warnings, no save game.
I also spent weeks finishing Full Throttle, and remember it fondly. Some parts were way too difficult, but this was such a unique game with great sound and fun cut scenes. The junkyard with the guard dogs, the bikes with nitro, the five-finger fillet challenges, the fights on the road with other bikers… this game was so different.
It makes me wish I could play it again and see how much of it I can remember after 25+ years. I see there's a remastered version on Steam, I'll have to give it a try!
Despite others talking about patience and walkthroughs, Maher rarely uses walkthroughs because they taint the experience of the game. I think what he's saying here is that once you strip out all the annoying parts of the game there are only two hours of actual game left.
Does he mean two hours when you already know the puzzles and are just performing the actions? I don't think that's a meaningful thing to say. Most people will spend hours trying to figure the puzzles out.
Today, we're used to games that throw massive resources away on scenery that we breeze through in mere seconds. Triple A games have budgets the size of hollywood blockbusters and it shows. If you spend enough money today, you can occupy someone with something new every minute for 40-80 hours.
In the 80's and early 90's, games had to deal with the constraints posed by comparatively tiny budgets (Full Throttle was an expensive game for the time, but cost less than a typical one hour TV episode) and limited hardware. Even if you spent what it took to deliver 80 hours of constantly changing material, you had to deliver it on cartridges, floppies or CD's.
The expectation back then was that, if you spent $50-60 on a game (not adjusting for inflation!), it should occupy 40-80 hours of your time. If you simply can't provide something new every few minutes for that period of time, then games needed to be difficult. They had to force players to bash their heads against the same content over and over again until they won. Action games required split-second timing and memorization of levels, while adventure games had to have convoluted and frequently unfair puzzles. By design, you were supposed to get stuck. Players had to be forced to kick every bucket, turn over every stone, and explore every last pixel of seemingly meaningless scenery. This is how you could turn two hours of content into an 80 hour game.
The author of this article compares Full Throttle to Day of the Tentacle to show why it's a bad game, but Day of the Tentacle is one of the very greatest adventure games ever written. It's like comparing a movie made today to Citizen Kane.
Full Throttle's puzzles were not out of step with other adventure games of the time. The reviewer is a bit unfair in how she lauds the "kick in the door" solution to the game's first barrier and then pan's the game for actually having some complex and, yes, unfair puzzles later on. She interprets that first solution as indicating this was a brute's game, and would be simpler than other adventure games, but the designers still had to make the game hard. Being able to bash through every obstacle would have made that impossible.
The action sequences were not sterling examples of game design, but they were better than people expected from an adventure game of it's era. Few games made until the mid 90's blurred the lines between action and adventure games for good reason. e.g. Game interfaces didn't have the built up conventions we have today. There wasn't nearly as much implicit knowledge you could expect of your audience. Action games of this era typically came with manuals that players were expected to read in order to figure out how to play the game. It was yet another extreme constraint to design action sequences that players could just jump into and figure out without any kind of coaching. When you got to the motorcycle fights or demolition derby, you were supposed to crash and burn until you figured it out. This seems horribly sadistic today, but it was a feature at the time. It added to the total amount of time you could spend on the game.
Today, games with great recorded soundtracks, voice acting, and quality animation are a dime a dozen, but Full Throttle had all these things when it blew people away just to have recorded voices or rock and roll in a video game rather than scrolling text and the comparatively rudimentary synthesized sound that was the rule for the time. Full Throttle made users feel like they were playing a TV show. This was something really new and it blew people away. The fact that Full Throttle told a good story too sealed the deal. It may not stand up to today's standards of gameplay, but it is fondly remembered by many for a reason.
> The author of this article compares Full Throttle to Day of the Tentacle to show why it's a bad game, but Day of the Tentacle is one of the very greatest adventure games ever written. It's like comparing a movie made today to Citizen Kane.
Which isn't at all unfair. When discussing something that doesn't work it is often helpful to compare it to something that did that thing right.
It's an interesting comparison for unintended reasons though: I love DoTT almost as much as Full Throttle, it's such a good and iconic game... but I also find it frustratingly difficult [1]. Ok, it didn't have action sequences like Full Throttle but its puzzles are frequently bizarre. I had to use a walkthrough to finish DoTT which always mars the experience, while I didn't for Full Throttle.
Don't get me wrong, I love DoTT. In fact, I feel like... taking over the world!
[1] Mind you, even DoTT is a piece of cake compared to its predecessor, Maniac Mansion!
Full throttle is probably my favourite LucasArts quest. The feel, the soundtrack, voice acting, the graphics. Hand drawn animation had some special charm in 320*200 resolution, which was somehow lost when the industry moved on to higher resolution graphics.
And the ending sequence was super dynamic and cinematic, I struggle to remember any game that it can be compared with.
I loved full throttle and it was a whole thing amongst me and my friends in middle school.
I couldn’t beat the biker gangs to jump over the canyon and thought it was a faulty crack of the game. But almost all games back then were impossible without walkthroughs or cheats, so the frustrating gameplay was frustrating but par for the course.
I disagree with the author saying that the inventory is too small, and puzzles not complex enough (yet still decrying the need for a walkthrough!)
Games before it had completely out there puzzles and I don’t believe anyone beat any of those games using only logic and in-game hints.
I also disagree with the statement about games being meant to be played:
> It serves as a demonstration that presentation can only get you so far in a game — that a game is meant to be played, not watched.
Some games are meant to be experienced. Old Mans Journey and Monument Valley were criticized for having too easy puzzles. Especially old mans journey is not about puzzles - puzzles are there to give players time to absorb the game world - beautiful art and music and have them soak enough of it up be primed for the emotional story progression.
Dave Grossman’s reduced involvement really was a significant change for Full Throttle. From the article:
> One can sense throughout Full Throttle its makers’ restlessness with the traditional adventure form — their impatience with convoluted puzzles, bulging inventories, and all of the other adventure staples. They just want to have some loud, brash fun.
And this from Schafer himself, in an interview for the 2017 remaster:
> Game design, character, and story are all one thing. They’re not separate. So the interface should be part of the thematic presentation of who the main character is, and how they would solve a problem.
> If Bernard from Day of the Tentacle had to unlock a door with a ham sandwich, he’d lubricate a piece of bread with mayonnaise, slide it under the door, poke the key on the other side through with a toothpick to drop it on the bread, then slide it back out. But Ben would kick the door down and eat the sandwich.
They made an HD remake, available on steam. I played it last month, and just like day of the tentacles and monkey island, I was talen by surprise when it finished way quicker than I thought. When you are a kid, those things seems so hard.
> Full Throttle was the first LucasArts game, and one of the first in general, to have an “all-digital” soundtrack: i.e., all of the sound in the game, including all of the music, was sampled from the real world rather than being synthesized on the computer.
What a bizarre statement.
I loved Full Throttle though! Haven't got a slightest recollection of it being frustrating, but I was a kid and it was one of the first adventure games I played - I guess my tolerance was still pretty high back then :)
The only bad thing about Full Throttle is the iPhone adaptation has a critical bug that hasn’t been fixed in years. It makes me sad. I want to play it again.
>we got a game with a sparkling fictional presentation and lousy interactive elements
I think there's a case to be made against that as well. The plot is weirdly placed, it is hard to buy in to the motivations behind for each plot point, and the characters act more like sensitive computer nerds rather than tough biker gang members.
That's not my impression at all. I think the characters are ace. And this is not only a recollection from back then, I bought the remastered version and confirmed my impressions.
I wouldn’t call this a hit piece. I have fond memories of this from when I was 13, but reading through his critique I find myself nodding and agreeing with every single point. That biking fight sequence in the canyon was incredibly annoying and my memory seems to have just glossed over it.
Each to their own, as in all creative endeavours I guess. I’m always going to be on the side of people making immersive games, versus those who think elegant mechanics are paramount.
There were a computer faire in my home town, I think I was sick or something and I could not go (me, my father and brother were crazy about computer and computer games) so, they come home from the faire telling me all about this new game they got to try at there. Incredible graphics, lots of action and most important it was a point and click game (we used to call this type of games adventures) Full Throttle definitely sent me into this rabbit hole of adventure games since I loved it so much. I have recently finished it again on my Xbox, since it got released on game pass. Great nostalgia
During the pandemic lockdown, David Bowie's son Duncan Jones wrote a screenplay adaptation of Full Throttle:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ojb9zaplszjcp63/FULL THROTTLE -for all.pdf