We're a long ways away from May 2018 and the next edition of the "May Maturity" 90s game feature I introduced this year, but I couldn't wait to finally rev up some Full Throttle: one of the few games from the peak LucasFilm/Schafer graphic adventure game era of the early-to-mid 90s that I'd never found the time to play back when it was new. It's no secret that Tim Schafer is a fan of leather jackets and heavy metal: we saw that lifelong passion come to fruition with the divisive labor of love that was Brutal Legend. Full Throttle feels almost like a dry run for that game, depicting a vaguely post-apocalyptic, Mad Maxian future of grim bikers, dusty and dilapidated buildings, hovercars for the rich, and makeshift rigs for the less endowed: a distinct feeling that the wealthy elite are doing just fine, but everyone else is struggling to eke out a living amidst the ruins of a near-future (from our perspective) civilization that collapsed for unknown reasons.

All the same, it's mostly just window dressing: the story concerns Ben Throttle, the leader of the relatively benevolent Polecats biker gang, who is ambushed and later framed by the unscrupulous suit Adrian Ripburger while the latter is busy plotting to violently take over the sole manufacturer of motorcycles in the country and replace its output with practical and boring minivans. The sordid tale also involves an equally stubborn love interest mechanic named Mo, rival animal-based gangs like the Vultures and the Rottwheelers, hapless corporate goons who talk with that one voice Maurice LaMarche uses for every sarcastic or sinister character he does, and a few action sequences to break up the usual format of finding objects and using them on other objects.

At this point in the timeline of point and click adventure games, we're firmly in the "verb wheel" era: by left-clicking on a hotspot, you get a small emblem which contains several different verb-based commands, from looking at it to either grabbing it or kicking it (or using one's mouth, which is used exactly once for a puzzle involving siphoning gas). Right-clicks bring up your inventory, allowing you to use an item on a hotspot instead. It's fairly straightforward stuff, the sort of streamlining that adventure games were seeing in tandem with a stronger focus on presentation and cutscenes, and it's perhaps the era of adventure gaming that has aged the least badly: by scaling back on the amount of context commands to use and world to interact with, there's fewer scenarios where the player is stuck trying to use everything on everything else to proceed. The game's surprisingly sparse on puzzles for that matter, with only a handful to solve in each of the game's zones before you're able to move on with the story. An early mission where you need to procure parts for your crashed bike, which involves finding three items across seven or eight screens, is about as elaborate as this traditional aspect ever gets. In lieu of that, the game throws in sequences like the Road Rash-style motorcycle combat - fairly mindless, though you do occasionally need to solve the puzzle of finding the right weapon for the right assailant, keeping somewhat in the spirit of Monkey Island's insult swordfighting - and dramatic set-pieces where you're mid action-scene and need to find the right series of actions to proceed. That said, there's no deaths, and in cases where Ben might conceivably die he simply gives you a fourth-wall breaking "lemme try that again" and you're sent back a few minutes prior.

There is, however, a lot of crashing. Not over-the-handlebars motorcycle crashing; the game-halting kind. I wasn't sure if this was the fault of my own hardware limitations - which has come up a worrying number of times with this feature - or something inherent to the game's newly remastered graphics. Full Throttle was known at the time for being fairly unstable with its addition of 3D polygonal vehicles, a relative rarity in 1995 and a definite luxury in what was otherwise a 2D pixel-based graphic adventure game. It's possible the brand new 3D graphics might've had a similar deleterious effect some 22 years on, but it seemed to occur even when I'd shifted back down to the original render mode (like Day of the Tentacle Remastered, you can hit F1 at any time to switch from the new graphics to the old and back). I didn't have much luck troubleshooting the issue - doesn't seem like a common complaint, at least - and managed to complete the game eventually, so I'll leave that out there as something to look out for but is probably not something anyone with a decent rig will have to worry about.

For many reasons, I'm glad I had the opportunity to amend one of my few glaring classic adventure game blindspots. While it has issues that the remaster couldn't completely solve, it's still important to the history of the genre, of LucasFilm's golden period, and the prehistory of Double Fine. Great voice-acting, decent script, well-paced plot; half the stuff that matters in a good adventure game is just gravy. The other half - the puzzles - is a little more threadbare and obtuse here (I heard there's a certain rock-kicking puzzle that was a real beast, but the remaster appears to have made it easier), but certainly nothing so off-putting even decades after the fact. One big remaining complaint though: that "Increased Chances" Abney Park song used for the menu. Just awful. What kind of reprobate rhymes "decreased" with "increased"?

Rating: 4 out of 5.