Full Throttle

Ask someone knowledgeable about the video game industry, especially its history, about noteworthy individual game designers, and Tim Schafer's name is more likely than not to be one of the first mentioned. His playfully dark style and penchant for witty dialogue give the games that he works on a feel all their own, and this is certainly true of his first game as project leader, Full Throttle.

Full Throttle takes place in a vaguely post-apocalyptic future, although aside from the prominence of hover-vehicles, it is not obvious that the game does not take place in the present day. The player's character is Ben, the tough-as-nails, cold-as-steel leader of a biker gang called the Polecats. The game also centers around Malcolm Corley, founder and patriarch of Corley Motors, the last motorcycle maker on Earth, and his scheming lieutenant, Adrian Ripburger. Ben becomes a fugitive from justice when he is framed for Corley's murder, and it is up to him to clear his name, get the Polecats out of jail, and stop Ripburger's evil plan to take over Corley Motors and have it manufacture minivans instead of motorcycles.

Full Throttle has the production power of LucasArts behind it, and it shows. The animated cutscenes are lively and engaging, and the interactive environments look as good as any of the company's games for DOS. Also, there are a fair number of inside references to the Lucas dynasty, such as both the insignias of the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance being used as tattoos in the game. The game's sound is one of its truly memorable features, especially the voice acting. For the most part, the voicing in the game is top-notch, with Mark Hamill voicing the sinister Ripburger (without a trace of Tatooine farm-boy whine), and long-time cartoon actors Kath Soucie, Maurice LaMarche, and Tress MacNeille also lending their voices to numerous characters. Although the spoken dialogue doesn't always seem to match what it seems the writer intended, the vast majority of the dialogue is believable, natural, and fitting. The incidental music fits the atmosphere, including a little country ditty heard on a radio in a trailer that, if you pay it any attention at all, will likely stay with you for a long time. The sound effects are satisfying, as well, with metallic clanks and deep-throated engine roars adding to the experience.

The vast majority of the game is played out as a traditional point-and-click adventure. The player is presented with a graphical layout of the area Ben is currently in, and the cursor's appearance will change depending on whether or not it is over a hotspot, or interactive object. Clicking on an interactive object will bring up a picture of the Polecats logo, which functions as a graphical menu of actions. The eyes in the logo's skull can be selected to look at whatever the player clicks on, or the skull's mouth to either place Ben's mouth on an object, or speak to a person. Other options include handling and kicking. Full Throttle was the first game to use such a system for interacting with the environment, the only other was the Curse of Monkey Island, which was released two years later. The game's puzzles are more logical and less outlandish than some other, more outlandish adventure games. While this does tend to take away from how interesting the puzzles are, it also makes them far less frustrating to solve. Furthermore, pixel-hunting is kept to a minimum, with all of the necessary objects reasonably distinct from their environments.

While the point-and-click adventure gameplay is of good quality, if unmemorable, the times when the game deviates from this mode are definitely more memorable, but not in the way the designers would have liked. In the middle of the game, Ben is tasked with procuring items from rival gangs, which he acquires through a series of melee fights while riding his bike. This change of pace is hampered by less-than-responsive controls, and dealing with bikers you don't need to fight, and who, perhaps, might defeat you, before being able to take on the gang member with the precise item you need at the moment. This portion is easily the most frustrating part of the game, especially since one enemy you face not only has the ability to beat you senseless, but also to steal the item you are wielding, setting your progress back. There are other deviations from traditional point-and-click adventure gameplay in Full Throttle, including a section near the end of the game where it becomes possible to die, although the only consequence of death is trying again from a slightly earlier point.

All-in-all, Full Throttle is a good adventure game, if a flawed one, full of character and atmosphere. A player familiar with the genre can play through it in 6 hours, the majority of which will be spent enjoying the environment and puzzles, instead of in frustration. Full Throttle can be credited as one of the games that raised the bar on storytelling and production quality in video games, a bar that Tim Schafer would raise again with Grim Fandango.