I would like to publically declare my love for Full Throttle. Something very strange happened with history and opinion on that game – it was well received by critics, it was completely fantastic, it was Tim Schafer’s most mature writing (three years before Grim Fandango). And then somehow it became the black sheep of LucasArts’ output, condemned by false memories of being too short, and having awful arcade sequences throughout. Which just isn’t true! Certainly it was a shorter adventure compared to others in their catalogue, but it was such an astonishingly fine one. And the arcade bits? Pieces of piss, apart from one crappy section with the demo derby. Get over it! Restore Full Throttle to its rightful glory! And then check out this excellent piece from Adventure Classic Gaming, discussing the fate of the two aborted sequels with former LucasArts artist, Bill Tiller.
LucasArts did seem to have a bit of a phase at the beginning of the decade, hellbent on killing off anything with a spark of imagination in order to focus on churning out dreadful Star Wars dross. Tiller provides some insight into those times, as well as going into excellent detail about what the first, almost unknown, sequel would have been about. Full Throttle: Payback was apparently going to be a straight point-and-click adventure, going deeper into hero, Ben’s life.
“The story line we wanted to be similar in them to FT1, so it revolved around a large corporation and the territorial governor concocting a plot to replace all paved highways with hover pads to help make the hover mini vans and family hover cars safer and faster. Of course, this plan didn’t sit well with the bikers and truckers, who were going to unit to fight this plot at a rally. The evil governor had secretly hired the Rotwheelers to assassinate Father Torque, the leader of this new alliance at the rally… So the first half the game Ben tries to stop the assassination, and the second half he teams up with a persistent undercover female reporter to bring the governor down and uncover his nefarious secret.”
Check out the rest of the interview/retrospective, here.
Thanks to Jonty.
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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.
“Thankfully my faith was restored with the release of The Dig. It had puzzles! It was freaking huge!”
That doesn’t sound like the game I played.
The main problem with The Dig is the fact that its world is so empty and the supporting characters don’t really do anything. Maggie just spends almost the whole game in that library while Brink keeps repairing that machine of his. It’s painful to read about what the game was supposed to be like when Brian Moriarty was designing it. http://www.mixnmojo.com/php/site/gamedb.php?gameid=29
Oh, and I did like the skeleton puzzle.
“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.
Kudos to whoever mentioned Discworld Noir – the only game I ever played that when I accidentally duplicated a item (the crowbar, for reference), then used it in a context when I had lost the original crowbar, had a fully voiced response of, “sure, I could break the glass with that, but I’m not supposed to have that now, am I, hummmm?”
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.
Rather fiendishly, Grim Fandango original cd an all wont run on me xp build….. Here goes with scummvm
DOTT – an awesome game, how on earth can you beat changing the american flag with an anatomy drawing of a tentacle or putting a jumper in for years and years of drying abuse just for a wee hamster :D
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).
If you want to experience Full Throttle without the arcade-derby-part and the puzzles, I recommend VGMD’s Full Throttle movie.
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:
monkeymonster: Sorry, Grim wasn’t SCUMM-based, so ScummVM doesn’t handle it. They’re working on it; last change five days ago.
@KruddMan: The band *was* the Gone Jackals, from all I can find online. I plan on emailing the band with the question, since I can’t find a definitive answer from the big G.
I like to imagine (given that these are all smart, but nonetheless super-roady biker fellows) that the credits were intentionally listed as Chitlins, Whiskey, and Skirt; being as they were likely the only motivation for writing music (particularly this song) in the first place. ^_~
The Gone Jackals certainly did the intro song anyway.
“Rather fiendishly, Grim Fandango original cd an all wont run on me xp build”
Yeah, I can’t get the second CD to work in Vista either, even in compatibility mode.
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.
Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle, The Dig, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango – a golden era of gaming – and all so good that they should NEVER have sequels.
New Sam and Max is evidence of this.
By the way RPS any chance of a LucasArts retrospective with interviews and such? It would be a must read article.
I was always a bit terrible at adventure games, so never really played Full Throttle. My first proper exposure to it came from this song by 65daysofstatic http://www.musicuploader.org/MUSIC/4607781220247677.mp3 utterly fantastic band by the way.
I now want to get a copy.
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
funnywitty as the golden lucas art’s games, but then again, what is these days?WHAT? Go say that to the designers at polycount and ca.org, you will be warmly received.
Designers HATED working on the tools available at the time where 3D modelling was concerned. Now they have a lot more freedom and are simply loving the shaders :D
We even made a fan video for it, featuring Australian retro band Wolfmother
We even made a fan video for it, featuring Australian retro band Wolfmother
Full video at Youtube