subedii says:

Wonder if Telltale might be able to get the rights to Full Throttle someday.

Or heck, anybody, it’s an awesome franchise just sitting there and LucasArts refuses to do anything with it.

August 27th, 2008 at 1:50 pm

Martin Kingsley says:

Agreed. Full Throttle blows my tiny mind even now.

August 27th, 2008 at 2:16 pm

Ian says:

I’ve heard excellent things about Full Throttle and yet have never played it. Perhaps this is my time to do so.

Is the one linked in the article for use with ScummVM?

August 27th, 2008 at 2:38 pm

The_B says:

Okami: Now be fair, Lego Star Wars isn’t ‘dreadful Star Wars Dross’. It’s a Quite Good Star Wars game. Although granted, that’s more TT’s doing than LucasArts. But they did publish it, I suppose.

And I remember my very first PC Gamer mag had a preview of Full Throttle 2 all that time ago. I still mourn its loss to this day, and maintain that the LucasArts adventure pack (with Sam & Max, The Dig, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango) was one of the best purchases I ever made. Certainly so in the adventure genre.

August 27th, 2008 at 2:39 pm

dartt says:

Whenever I smell asphalt, I think of Full Throttle.

August 27th, 2008 at 2:52 pm

Yann Best says:

Full Throttle was fantastic, particularly the ending (Ben doesn’t get the girl… because he’d rather stick to his bikes, thanks), and I have noticed that it’s been wallpapered over in the years following its released. I wonder how much of that is to do with the action sequences, and how much is to do with its mood: of the fondly remembered Lucasarts adventures, all bar Grim Fandango and Fate of Atlantis are clear-cut comedies (MI, DOTT, S&M), and FoA has the Indiana Jones effect in its favour while Grim Fandango has its unique stylings.

Full Throttle, on the other hand, plays things relatively straight both in terms of its aesthetic and its plot, without tying into a popular pre-existing universe; all things which I can imagine helped people forget about/ignore it. Pretty much the same problems that The Dig faced, in fact (the difference being that The Dig was, in fact, a pretty uninspiring game). People just don’t want gruff, action-hero types in their point and click adventures - even if said character and adventure have an awful lot of quality under their skin.

August 27th, 2008 at 3:05 pm

Meat Circus says:

Box of Toy Bunnies + Minefield = One of the happiest moments in gaming.

I recently replayed it on ScummVM, and was rather startled to discover that it is far better than I remember it. However, John, it *is* ridiculously short.

Revisionism can’t make it any longer.

August 27th, 2008 at 3:22 pm

Meat Circus says:

@Ginger Yellow:

You need the entire box of bunnies. One at a time will not get you across.

August 27th, 2008 at 3:36 pm

Subtle says:

Full Throttle! I haven’t thought of that game for years! I remember playing it at age 16, and my first girlfriend being absolutely appalled by it for some reason. It was my first indication that girls and videogames usually don’t mix…
Now I feel old. Thanks, RPS…

August 27th, 2008 at 3:57 pm

The Sombrero Kid says:

i used to love playing the knife hand game and just repeatedly jamming it in his hand and him going ouch and then at the end admitting he’s pretty bad at it, can’t remember it exactly cause it’s been about 10 years since i last played it but yeah that was awesome, that kick wall clicking machine puzzle is a bitch though!

August 27th, 2008 at 4:34 pm

Darius K. says:

The first thing I did when I got scummvm running on my Wii was play Full Throttle. Still awesome to this day.

August 27th, 2008 at 5:06 pm

zanbowser says:

Is it telling that I have that track by the Gone Jackals on my mp3 player?

“I thank tha Lo-ooo-worrrd each dayee… fur thee Apocalypse.”

Best VG track ever, for my (meager) dollar.

August 27th, 2008 at 5:14 pm

Tim James says:

ScummVM doesn’t play those?

August 27th, 2008 at 5:17 pm

Yann Best says:

DOTT certainly works perfectly in ScummVM, though S&M did have some problems last time I played it (the action/mini-game segments, mainly).

Edit: gah, too slow. I’d hardly agree with S&M being THE BEST, though. I will agree it’s got popular appeal, mind, so perhaps it is ‘regarded’ as THE BEST (probably along with MI and/or GF - DOTT seems to be a little less popular than those, despite clearly, actually being the best Lucasarts adventure, so nyer).

August 27th, 2008 at 5:56 pm

Rath says:

Sequels to Full Throttle and Grim Fandango would make my day.

Or, wonder of wonders - both in one. Ben actually dies at one point, and gets sent to the underworld as seen in Grim Fandango. Where Glottis is his Reaper/Travel Agent. Imagine the team they’d make, with the enthusiasm for fast machines and such. Then Ben gets back to the Land Of The Living somehow to right the wrongs, and so forth.

Imagine the potential for Ghost Rider puns.

August 27th, 2008 at 6:07 pm

Max Cairnduff says:

I released them bit by bit I think, then walked along the cleared path, then released some more, then walked along the further cleared path, etc.

It’s actually not a particularly intuitive puzzle, but then one could say that of many adventure games.

August 27th, 2008 at 6:07 pm

Jay says:

Preach the love, brother!

August 27th, 2008 at 6:40 pm

KruddMan says:

“I thank tha Lo-ooo-worrrd each dayee… fur thee Apocalypse.”
that song isn’t actually Gone Jackals it’s some band called Chitlins Whiskey and Skirt

August 27th, 2008 at 7:00 pm

Dr. Quincy says:

Unfortunately Full Throttle is just slightly too butch to work on the (whisper it) Nintendo DS version of ScummVM. Sigh!

August 27th, 2008 at 7:01 pm

Nick says:

I dearly loved Full Throttle, but it was criminally short, despite what you may say!

I liked Ben’s style of puzzle solving too (use ring on man’s nose)

August 27th, 2008 at 7:38 pm

James G says:

I picked up Toonstruck for £2 in game about a year after it game out, and thought it was quite good fun. I must admit, I’ve not seen much hate for it, most people just end up thinking ‘Toonwhat?’

::Sigh:: I think I’m stuck in the past with respect to games, I loved graphic adventures, and still prefer strategic RPGs to action RPGs.

August 27th, 2008 at 8:08 pm

CaptainJorge says:

Great game. Damn shame LucasArts stopped being original in the last decade.

August 27th, 2008 at 9:24 pm

Ergates says:

@All
This was some time ago - I don’t think SCUMMVM was around then.
I knew they were good, and I dearly wanted to play them but..all I got was KABOOM!
Should still have the CDs in the loft somewhere - I’ll hoick them out at the weekend and look up SCUMMVM.

August 27th, 2008 at 9:59 pm

Jochen Scheisse says:

It IS real short. A friend of mine and I decided to replay Full Throttle recently, and after about 3 hours of playing we were finished. We started Dark Corners of the Earth after that to end the evening with something. Anyway, still a great game.

August 28th, 2008 at 12:38 am

Ninelives says:

POLECATS, ROLL OUT

August 28th, 2008 at 3:49 am

Mark Stevens says:

Jumping on the “too short” bandwagon.

Full Throttle was the first LucasArts adventure that left me feeling unfulfilled. There’s much that’s great about it, including the wonderful art direction, music, dialogue—just the general ambience really.

In addition to being too short, the puzzles were practically nonexistent. I wasn’t look for a level of surrealism that occasionally accompanied Monkey Island and Indiana Jones puzzles, but the approach to puzzle-solving in Full Throttle was far too linear to offer a challenge.

I must admit, when the end credits scrolled by, some five hours into my first session (with a small break for dinner), I laughed at loud, thinking it to be a typical LucasArts fourth wall bashing joke. When I found myself staring at the DOS prompt I sat in stunned silence for a few minutes. Was that it? The previous games had entertained me for about a fortnight each. What was going on?

Thankfully my faith was restored with the release of The Dig. It had puzzles! It was freaking huge! Plus all the other usual ingredients: great graphics, sound, dialogue, etc. While The Dig was critically well received, whenever a roundup of LucasArts adventures appears online, The Dig’s usually somewhere near the bottom. I’ve never been able to understand this. It seems quite a few people struggled with the lack of outright comedy. Others couldn’t get past the alien skeleton puzzle, which was a bit odd as a blindingly obvious solution was just a screen away.

Anyway, I really do like Full Throttle—while it lasts. But I’ve never understood why it got so much adoration heaped upon it while The Dig had to make do with being buried under compost.

August 28th, 2008 at 4:56 am

Ginger Yellow says:

“While The Dig was critically well received, whenever a roundup of LucasArts adventures appears online, The Dig’s usually somewhere near the bottom. I’ve never been able to understand this. It seems quite a few people struggled with the lack of outright comedy. ”

I really think that’s it. There are lots of decent adventure games (or there were). There are very few as funny as the best LucasArts ones.

August 28th, 2008 at 10:29 am

Bobsy says:

Okami: Now be fair, Lego Star Wars isn’t ‘dreadful Star Wars Dross’. It’s a Quite Good Star Wars game. Although granted, that’s more TT’s doing than LucasArts. But they did publish it, I suppose.

Which is more or less the nub of the matter. These days Lucasarts quality measure depends on outsourcing the development. See also: Kotor. But in Lucasarts’s heyday, their internal development house was a force to be reckoned with. Not just the adventures, but also stuff like Jedi Knight.

Lose marks for including the X-Wing series in there; they were made by the lovely Totally Games. I wonder what they’re up to these days.

August 28th, 2008 at 11:20 am

Max Cairnduff says:

I rather like the occasional short game, apart from anything else it means I can be fairly sure of completing it.

Full Throttle told its story, it told it well, what more could one ask? Adding more length would likely have detracted from its charm.

For me, the trouble with the Dig was the ending, which I thought rather sappy and also damaging to the drama and meaning of what had gone before. I hated that ending (hated in the ordinary English sense of didn’t really like, not the internet sense of stalking its writers and posting multi-page rants about it decades later).

On a grognardy note, no love here for Broken Sword? The first one is probably one of my favourite computer games of all time, cruelly left out of the PCG top 100 in place of such fol de rol as Warcraft III (a game I got thoroughly bored with round about the start of the elven missions).

August 28th, 2008 at 12:06 pm

LionsPhil says:

The Dig was truly awful Spielburg dreck, sorry. The characters were all completely insufferable, and it couldn’t have been cheesier if it were trying to do so on purpose. But it wasn’t a parody—it was po-facedly serious, like a thirteen-year-old blogging about how Google will take over the world by 2015.

And the lead dev who finished it hated FT, which clearly shows that they are a bad person:

Some team members experimented with a Full Throttle-style control method, using a sheer glass pentagon with the five icons arrayed around it. But Sean rejected the idea, due to his disdain for that game.

monkeymonster: Sorry, Grim wasn’t SCUMM-based, so ScummVM doesn’t handle it. They’re working on it; last change five days ago.

August 28th, 2008 at 2:25 pm

Nick says:

The Gone Jackals certainly did the intro song anyway.

August 28th, 2008 at 5:21 pm

MRC says:

its weird that this article is up now. I just started playing Full Throttle for the first time ever a couple of day ago, i tried playing it a while back but i couldn’t get it to run on my pc, i recently got summVM and it was the first game i tried on it. so much fun! day of the tentacle is next.

August 28th, 2008 at 7:11 pm

MeestaNob! says:

By the way RPS any chance of a LucasArts retrospective with interviews and such? It would be a must read article.

August 29th, 2008 at 3:04 am

Marar says:

I really don’t get the “new sam and max” bashing, i mean sure, the first season was rather dull, but you can feel the episodes getting better as the team get’s confortable, and i found the second season’s last two episodes hillarios, sure they’re not as funny witty as the golden lucas art’s games, but then again, what is these days?

November 18th, 2008 at 9:43 am