Hacker Cinema
Full Throttle
1995 · Film · 60 min
Directed by Mark Chapman
Rowan Atkinson plays motor racing ace Sir Henry "Tim" Birkin. He was a brilliant racing driver of the 1920s and 1930s whose determination to win made him a hero but caused problems in his personal life.
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9 comments on Hacker News
I played it when it was released and mostly enjoyed it, though I can't remember what difficulty setting I picked. I bought it mostly because I like Mark Ferrari's art, but ended up completing it. Some characters and jokes were intensely annoying, especially Ransome. I did like Delores, though.
Afterwards, I revisited some LucasArts games I'd played before (Monkey Island 1 and 2), and tried my hand with some I hadn't (Fate of Atlantis, Sam'n'Max, Full Throttle and also Flight of the Amazon Queen, which isn't from LucasArts). I think what you describe is actually fairly representative of the overall LucasArts experience. Character building is limited, even the funny jokes get tiresome after you've clicked through them a fifth time, some puzzles are illogical even for games with a sillier tone (monkey wrench, anyone?), and there's often a lot of walking about, repeating conversations, and clicking randomly just to see what happens. Some of them (Thimbleweed Park, MI2) also have exceptionally poor endings.
Out of the games I played, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis was the best, though I got stuck (by forgetting some object in a room outside a complex labyrinth) close to the end and didn't bother completing it. The main character is pre-established, the plot feels like an Indy movie, and I can't recall any genuinely preposterous puzzle solutions (though it was a few years ago now).
I love the Monkey Island games, they're a part of my childhood. But I mostly love them for the music and graphics, not necessarily for the puzzles or the many gags that other people always seem to find a lot funnier than I do.
I think one understated problem Grim Fandango had is that it's too adult.
Today "adult" often means "there's sex and/or gore", but the content is still simple and juvenile. But Grim Fandango isn't like that, it's just full of themes that probably confused the heck out of almost every kid that tried to play it.
Like the very first chapter throws you right into office politics. You deal with stealing a job from another salesman, sabotage a pneumatic tube messaging system, and sneak into your boss' office.
It all makes perfect sense for adults familiar with office work and all the movies it references. But I recall I tried it when I was maybe 14 and I couldn't make head nor tails of it. I didn't even realize the pneumatic tubes were actually a thing.
Things like Monkey Island and even Full Throttle are far more accessible.
lucasarts had a string of hits that are timeless, dig, day of the tentacle, sam and max[had own tv show], and full throttle. great single player games that didn't require fast user clicks. you can go at your own pace.
it was like the studio Ghibli of the 90s
I really loved The Dig, and filfre.net has disappointed me again after his review of Full Throttle. No, not because he disagrees with me about games I liked, but because I think he overstates his case and downplays the strengths of those games.
What I loved about The Dig: how cinematic it feels (unsurprisingly, I also liked this about Full Throttle, but The Dig feels like a movie at times). That the plot is "serious" scifi. That unlike most point-and-click adventures of its time, it takes itself (mostly) seriously: The Dig is a serious work of scifi, not an excuse to write gags.
That ending where you can choose to break a vow and do something you promised not to -- powerful!
The Dig is hard, true, but compared to one other "serious" adventure game I can think of it's a piece of cake: it's way easier than I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream (which I couldn't finish without a walkthrough).
> 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.
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.
Walkthroughs.
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 scuttlebutt is that Disney executives simply don't know what LucasArts IP they bought when they bought Lucasfilm and it will likely take new blood at the executive level with some bit of videogame literacy.
Some of that might also be complicated by existing licensing contracts. For instance, it's not clear from the outside how much Double Fine (and thus Microsoft) owns now of the games they managed to remake (Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango). Maybe Microsoft has the movie rights now? That would be funny, though Microsoft's attempts at movies to date have all been cursed.
If you browse around YouTube you might be able to still find an edited version of all cut scenes from full throttle + some dialogue parts.
It plays pretty much like a 1 hour short film and is really good on its own.