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LucasArts Full Throttle Remastered by Double Fine - For PS4 and Vita AND PC!

AetherVagrant

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As far as I could tell no, they sucked majorly. Just like before, and were the most time I spent on any one part of the game. you can "skip" them, but it only cancels them, doesnt win the fight and give you the item.
 

Mozg

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Oct 20, 2015
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They have any legal trouble with the music licenses? I'm kinda surprised they don't use that Gone Jackals song in the trailer.

 

Dexter

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So.

Next One : the Dig ?

When do they go Beamdog and make the real Monkey Island 3 instead ?
I think the only games left Tim Schafer worked on at LucasArts that haven't been "Remastered" yet (e.g. The Secret of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango) are Maniac Mansion (hard to do) and The Curse of Monkey Island (which was actually a solid game in itself, even though Ron Gilbert didn't work on it anymore). So maybe they'll do Curse?

From the rest of the LucasArts repertoire they didn't work on there's also the Original Sam & Max: Hit the Road, The Dig and LOOM (although LOOM and The Dig are also sold separately on various digital stores, which would indicate they likely won't get "Remastered", none of the other games like the Monkey Island parts, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle or Grim Fandango were available on any digital stores before the Remasters arrived):



Keeping that in mind, it's likely that if it still happens it might be either The Curse of Monkey Island or Sam & Max: Hit the Road getting said treatment. There's also the two Indiana Jones games, but the franchise is a lot more important and worth a lot more so that makes it unlikely.

If they went "Beamdog" they'd just take the games, fix a few "bugs" and make a few UI improvements and re-released them, thankfully that's not the only thing they are doing.
 

Boleskine

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https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/04/19/full-throttle-remastered-review/

Wot I Think: Full Throttle Remastered

By John Walker on April 19th, 2017 at 5:00 pm.

Full Throttle Remastered [official site] is the return of perhaps the most under-appreciated of the classic 90s LucasArts adventures. Double Fine’s remastering will hopefully go a long way to seeing it gain a reputation among a new generation. Here’s wot I think:

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There’s a temptation to take my review of Day Of The Tentacle Remastered, then Find/Replace “DOTT” for “Full Throttle”. Double Fine are onto a good thing here, taking some of the best loved games of the 1990s, redrawing the art, remixing the sound, and releasing them in working condition for modern PCs. May they not stop at LucasArts games, and do the rest of the industry too. It can feel difficult to add much more to the discussion, because if you hate the new art but love the new sound, switch the first off and the second on. It’s Full Throttle, it’s the same great-but-flawed adventure, the same gorgeously detailed but far too short tale of biker Ben in a future world where cars no longer have wheels.

Then of course it occurs to me not everyone is ancient. While there’s pretty much no excuse for not knowing about Day Of The Tentacle and Sam & Max: Hit The Road, it’s far more feasible that someone not born before the 90s would have entirely missed Full Throttle. Not because it didn’t succeed – it was one of LucasArt’s most successful adventures, selling well over a million copies, ten times what they’d expected. But it’s the one that’s mentioned after DOTT, S&M, Grim Fandango, Fate Of Atlantis, and of course the Monkey Island series. It can lay claim to a greater place in people’s memories than LOOM, sure, but it’s fair to say it hasn’t received the long-term adulation given elsewhere. And that’s not really fair.

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Schafer’s ’90 heydays saw his projects become increasingly meaningful to him, delving into a world or a theme in an intimate manner, and perhaps never better than in Grim Fandango. But Full Throttle was a loving look at the land of the grease monkey, setting the more usually villainous biker character as the hero in a near-future setting where cars fly and only one company makes motorcycles any more. A company that is being brought down from within with the intention of making minivans. Minivans.

The evil Adrian Ripburger (voiced by Mark Hamill, with an early demonstration of his penchant for growly-throated baddie types) murders Malcolm Corley, the founder and CEO of Corley Motors, and frames biker gang The Polecats for the crime. Ben, the gang’s leader, is your character, now on the run from the police and aided by Maureen Corley, daughter of the now-late Malcolm. And so it is that you inventory puzzle your way through a beautifully painted, murky world of desert roads and run-down provinces, proving your innocence and saving the wheel.

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On release, Full Throttle was perhaps the first sign of adventure fatigue from critics. It was 1995, and the flawless DOTT and S&M had in years past rightly received rave reviews from everywhere, inducing everyone else in the industry to try to copy. The press were perhaps looking to take LucasArts down a peg, and Full Throttle provided the opportunity. It was short, the puzzles were simpler, and it had some absolutely god-awful action sequences. It didn’t receive a drubbing, of course – but it did represent the beginnings of the tedious decision that the time of the adventure was coming to an end. It was the turning point, from “YAY ADVENTURES!” to the incessant idiocy of “Adventure games are dead, apart from this one,” on every release.

Length really was the issue most focused on – something that just seems bizarre today in our world of hundred-million-dollar six hour FPS games. But games were big back then, and Full Throttle’s tale not taking so long to tell felt unusual. Something exacerbated by the other anachronistic notion from those Days Of Yore: puzzles.

It’s impossible to believe today, but people used to get stuck on a game and respond by stopping and thinking about it for a few hours, maybe overnight. Impossible. Try to believe it… See? And yet it was true. Full Throttle wanted to move away from that, and in that ideology was deeply prescient of where the genre (and all of gaming) was heading. It wanted to offer challenges that could be solved there and then, with some hard thinking. It’s completely bonkers that today the challenges in FT are FAR harder than anything you’d get in a present-day point-and-clicker, but at the time not needing to wait for the next issue of your favourite gaming magazine in hope that particular puzzle might be solved in the back pages was considered anus. And indeed sped up the process of playing an already shorter game.

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As with last year’s DOTT, Double Fine have done a really lovely job updating, especially with the sound. You can switch back and forth between the original mono monotony, and the superbly remixed version, and there’s no contest – crisp, clear voices over unfuzzy music – it’s a joy. And no more joyous than the late Roy Conrad’s stunning performance as Ben. What a treat to hear his euphonious growling voice so distinctly. They’ve also made some neat tweaks to the interface, the contextual pop-up click menu no longer needing the mouse button to be held down, for instance. (Although you can set that back if you’re mad.) The art is going to be far more in the eye of the beholder, but it’s undeniably faithful to the original.

DOTT’s remaster resulted in scenes that looked far better for being updated, and others that looked worse. I think Full Throttle sees a lot more of the latter, but because the original was just so beautiful. As I obsessively F1 between the original and remastered version in every scene, sometimes I wonder at how blurry and ill-defined key objects were on the screen, and am grateful for the improvements. But it never looks aesthetically better. The original pixel art was some of the best ever, and something is distinctly lost in the upgrading process.

I believe that’s a result of the process, rather than a condemnation of the new art. In trying to remain faithful to the original design, the art is restricted in a way that means it just isn’t suited. I imagine the same team given the freedom to draw the scenes to their own vision could do something lovely with the style, but for me, here, it feels less than the original.

thro01.jpg


There are, unfortunately, some elements that are rather shoddy. A new ability to highlight interactive objects by pressing Shift is poorly implemented, with key objects missed and areas showing highlights where there’s nothing. Plus all the new menus look haphazardly thrown together, the instruction screens especially amateurish, looking like a late 90s Geocities site. It’s oddly tacky, unreflective of the core game, and disappointingly slapdash. There’s also a very welcome optional audio commentary, containing some lovely #bants about the game’s development from the original team, but they’ve been put in really strangely.

Chatter for a scene is triggered by pressing A, but is sometimes peculiarly incongruous to that moment. And frustratingly, it doesn’t bother to note if you’ve listened, so will prompt you to press A again on return only to hear the same thing again. Yet sometimes it may have updated, so you’ll want to check. Nrrgghh. Weirder still, it’ll sometimes come in uninvited over cutscenes, meaning it collides with the in-game dialogue for a bit of chatter you can’t listen to again after. The audio quality for the commentary is also really poor, everyone at different levels, the sound hissy and untidy, with conversation abruptly cut off at seemingly arbitrary points. Such a shame, as what’s being said is generally splendid.

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The ability to tweak it to the version of Full Throttle you want (I’d recommend the wonderful original art with the excellent new sound and music) rules out most complaints you could have. It needs another pass for minor bugs mentioned above, but nothing is serious. In the end, this is Full Throttle made playable once again, and that’s something to be celebrated. It’s a really fantastic game, with a lovely story, and brilliant performances. And out of its original timeline it’s free to just be itself, not compared to the last or the next LucasArts adventure to hit the shelves. If you loved the original, this is worth buying for the improved sound alone. If you never played it, then oh my goodness, hurry up!
 

jfrisby

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thro10a.jpg

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Did they zoom-in the original pixel art to make it widescreen or something?
Also, Walker writing an article about the art without including the actual original:

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Unkillable Cat

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So.

Next One : the Dig ?

When do they go Beamdog and make the real Monkey Island 3 instead ?
I think the only games left Tim Schafer worked on at LucasArts that haven't been "Remastered" yet (e.g. The Secret of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango) are Maniac Mansion (hard to do) and The Curse of Monkey Island (which was actually a solid game in itself, even though Ron Gilbert didn't work on it anymore). So maybe they'll do Curse?

From the rest of the LucasArts repertoire they didn't work on there's also the Original Sam & Max: Hit the Road, The Dig and LOOM (although LOOM and The Dig are also sold separately on various digital stores, which would indicate they likely won't get "Remastered", none of the other games like the Monkey Island parts, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle or Grim Fandango were available on any digital stores before the Remasters arrived):



Keeping that in mind, it's likely that if it still happens it might be either The Curse of Monkey Island or Sam & Max: Hit the Road getting said treatment. There's also the two Indiana Jones games, but the franchise is a lot more important and worth a lot more so that makes it unlikely.

If they went "Beamdog" they'd just take the games, fix a few "bugs" and make a few UI improvements and re-released them, thankfully that's not the only thing they are doing.


I don't think they'll make a Remastered title for 2018 as I they'll be too busy getting Psychonauts 2 out the door, but I could be wrong.

If they're gonna continue remastering classic LucasArts games and are looking for good pickings, I'd say Curse of Monkey Island is the best bet. Currently it needs ScummVM to run on modern systems so a lot of people are missing out on it, and maybe then they could do something about that missing cutscene that breaks the flow of the game right at the end.

What would be a brilliant move on behalf of Disney would be to have Double Fine remaster Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis in 2019, just in time for the fifth Indiana Jones film...and this time have Harrison Ford voice Indy in the game! He did voice work for Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens, so this should be a snap for him.

But knowing Double Fine, they'll probably do Escape From Monkey Island next, because it uses the Grim Fandango engine and is therefore much easier to work with than some of the older LucasArts games.
 

Barbarian

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Curse of Monkey Island does not need a remaster. At all. The game has aged very well and I doubt a remaster would make sense even 10 years from now unless they remake it in 3d or other bullshit.

Loom is one game I would like to see remastered.
 

Unkillable Cat

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I just had a go at the Remastered Full Throttle.

Pros: It's still Full Throttle.

Cons: It's still Full Throttle.

I only remember bits and pieces of this game, so it felt kinda good playing this game for the first time since 1995, but the biggest problem with the game is that for a LucasArts adventure game it's painfully short and remarkably superficial. The Remastered version has a percentage value for how far you've progressed in the game, and what I felt was like the end of Act 1 turned out to be the half-way point of the game!

To sum up my experience of Full Throttle:

# Awesome intro tune, the penultimate highpoint of the game.
# Opening part is amazing, sets a good scene, a good groove and a cool character.
# Mark Hamill is a cool and amazing voice actor, but he felt like he was phoning in Adrian Ripburger. A tad disappointing.
# "You know what would look good on your nose?" is the absolute highpoint of the game. Schwarzenegger is kicking himself for not having said that in one of his films.
# Keep playing, next area is alright, but already I feel like the game is stretching the yarn.
# Fucking junkyard dog, took me forever to remember how exactly to deal with him.
# Reach the Mine Road and all the battles. Remember this part all too well, so it's done with quickly before I get board with it (geddit?).
# Game crashes as I try to jump the gorge, ends my first playing session.
# Try again the day after.
# "Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit..."
# DAT FUCKING DRIVING MINIGAME
# Only thing going Full Throttle now is plot exposition.
# Looking back, that Chekov's Gun with the airplane was way too obvious to have any cool impact on the story.
# After Ripburger's exposed, Hamill shifts up a gear and goes Joker on us...not a bad thing.
# I flounder about with the endgame, still manage to make it a win despite having no idea what I'm doing.
# Poor Mo, got her heart stuck on a free-spirited bum like Ben.
# At least the end credists are amusing.
# Tim Schafer hates cats, why am I not surprised?
# The End.

Full Throttle is still a cool game and worth playing, but it's not on the same level as a good chunk of the LucasArts catalogue. It dared to be different and it should have been deep where it went shallow, and it went deep where it should have been shallow.
 
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Boleskine

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http://www.pcgamer.com/full-throttle-remastered-review/

Full Throttle Remastered review
By Andy Kelly an hour ago

More than one puzzle in Full Throttle is solved by kicking something, which neatly illustrates what makes it different from most point-and-click adventures. Protagonist Ben is a tough, gruff biker. A burly slab of meat stuffed into a leather jacket with a chin you could polish stone on. And this plays into every aspect of the game, from the puzzles and storyline, to the hard rock soundtrack.

But the key to the game is that while Ben is indeed a hard-ass who can handle himself in a fight, he also has a heart. Monkey Island was an ode to the romantic idea of piracy, and Full Throttle does the same for bikers. It’s more about freedom, authenticity, and cool leather jackets than the sort of thing you read about in Hunter S. Thompson's Hell’s Angels or watch in Sons of Anarchy.

Ben’s world is small—he mentions several times that his bike is his home—but it’s still under threat. He’s on the run for a crime he didn’t commit and, worst of all, the last motorcycle manufacturer in the country, Corley Motors, is ceasing production of bikes and moving into making hovering minivans. A lot of games deal with the end of the world, but Full Throttle is about the end of Ben’s world. And this makes for an uniquely personal story.

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Ben’s deep monotone voice, courtesy of the late Roy Conrad, is what makes the character really special. He underplays the role perfectly, and his deadpan delivery means the game is full of killer lines. And he sounds even better in the remaster. Double Fine found the tapes from the original voice recording sessions, and it’s a strange sensation hearing all those famous lines without a layer of fuzz over the top. Hearing Ben’s voice rumble through my speakers again, now beautifully clear and uncompressed, is a delight.

This was the first LucasArts adventure released after the Day of the Tentacle, and it couldn’t be more different. The puzzles are a lot simpler, the interface is more streamlined, and the presentation is way more lavish and cinematic. Instead of the old verb buffet at the bottom of the screen, clicking on an object brings up a flaming skull with a selection of actions that reflect Ben’s character: the gloved fist and the leather boot being the most frequently utilised.

The downside of this simplified design is that the game is arguably too short, taking about 5-6 hours to finish depending on how many puzzles you get stuck on. I know them all inside out and I clocked it in just three. But it does mean that it’s more fast-paced, dynamic, and exciting than most adventure games. And, in hindsight, maybe that’s a better fit for a game about a guy like Ben. If he spent more time wandering around solving puzzles than tearing off to the next location on his hog, he wouldn’t be much of a biker, would he?

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If you want a satisfying, challenging puzzle-solving experience, play Day of the Tentacle or Thimbleweed Park. Full Throttle’s strengths are its story, characters, atmosphere, and art, not its puzzles. And, hey, sometimes that’s fine. I’ve replayed it more times than any other adventure game, which is likely a result of that sharper focus and pared-down interface. But I can totally see some people, particularly if they have no nostalgia for it, feeling short-changed.

As for the remastered visuals, it’s clear Double Fine’s artists have put a lot of effort into repainting every location and cutscene. It’s handsome enough, albeit with a few backgrounds that look a bit smudgy and rushed. But, honestly, the original pixel art looks nicer to me, and I ended up playing with the old graphics and the remixed audio, which sounds fantastic. There are some nice extras for fans too, including previously unseen concept art by LucasArts legend Peter Chan and a fun, laid-back developer commentary.

The Mine Road sequence, in which you take part in Road Rash-style bike fights, has aged fairly terribly, and the sluggish mouse controls make getting through it a chore. But occasional bad minigame aside, I enjoyed returning to Full Throttle. Its stylish, Mad Max-inspired world of bikers, murderous truckers, and battery-powered bunnies is full of charm and personality, and the story, although short-lived, is entertaining until the bittersweet end.

The Verdict
77
Read our review policy
Full Throttle Remastered
A cinematic, high-octane, but short-lived adventure, lovingly remastered for a new generation.
 

Infinitron

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http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-05-02-full-throttle-remastered-review

Full Throttle Remastered review
Polecats ride again.

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A glorious ride down a futuristic California that never was.

Full Throttle wears its testosterone like the leather jacket it earned from riding with Hell's Angels when it was ten: with gusto, some verve and a kind of unrestrained joy. The original was a point-and-click classic, unsubtle about its affection for rock music and biker gang mythology, selling over a million copies in its lifetime. The remastered version is all of that and developer commentary, improved audio, and brand-new graphics.

Full Throttle Remastered
  • Publisher: Double Fine
  • Developer: Double Fine
  • Platform: Reviewed on PS4
  • Availability: Out now on PC and PS4
But I'll get to the new features in a minute. For now, let's take a detour down memory lane. What's Full Throttle? Sometimes categorised as an action-adventure game, it opens without excessive exposition, with a luxury hovercraft gliding down the highway. Two old men in expensive suits sit inside, bickering. Through the rear window, we see a biker gang coming up behind them, '90s spike-studded cool on full display. They don't wait for the limousine to make way. The gang rides past and over the vehicle, crushing the limo's hood ornament beneath its wheels.

Their audacity, of course, earns the attention of one of the two men. And after the introductory credits are concluded, we see the geriatric pair pulling up to a rough-and-tough bar. One thing leads to another, and Ben finds himself waking up in a dumpster, poorer by a crew, and richer by a grudge.

Needless to say, Ben's pissed.

Unlike Guybrush Threepwood or, really, so many adventure game protagonists, Ben doesn't waste time on niceties. From the moment you regain control of the man, Full Throttle makes it clear that there's nothing wrong with punching life in the jaw. Ben's approach to the world is beautifully exemplified by the user interface. The pie wheel of available actions is, quite literally, Ben's biker gang tattoo. Use it to kick, grab, eyeball, and rudely lick the world around you. And don't worry. Ben will tell you if he doesn't feel like putting his lips on something.

The world of Full Throttle is tactile and larger than life, a futuristic California done up in chrome. There's a sense that something epic is always happening somewhere, and if Ben wasn't so subsumed by his personal quest, we might be able to ride into the stand-off that decides the fate of the world.

And it is gorgeous. The original was fantastically adept at working around the limitations of its engine, and oh-so exquisitely detailed. (I disliked the 3D elements of Full Throttle but their use, I suspect, had a lot to do with the fact that it was a burgeoning trend.) But I don't know how I feel in regards to the remastered artwork.

There's nothing wrong about the chosen style, per se. Care was clearly taken to preserve the look and feel of the original. Unfortunately, this occasionally results in some visual anomalies. In conversation, characters sometimes twitch and judder, heads snapping back and forth with every other word. It is a strange, strange thing to witness. But then you flip back to the original artwork, and it all makes sense again.

But this wasn't a deal breaker for me and it'd unlikely be for you. What I did love, though, was the crispness of the music, the clarity of the cast's voices. Roy Conrad might have passed on, but his growling, hard-as-nails baritone lives on in high-fidelity.

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The remastered art is considerate and, thankfully, optional.

Now, onto the nitpicking. If you were hoping that this might be something you could sink hours into, you're likely to be disappointed. Full Throttle is a relatively short experience and the puzzles are rarely very elaborate. Ben, as I've mentioned earlier, is an efficient character. He doesn't mince words or chase red herrings. The only thing that could be construed as time waster, perhaps, is Full Throttle's mildly fiddly combat sequences.

To be fair, they're fun when you have the mechanics figured out. Two bikers on their vehicles, rousing music, some smack talk. Punch, kick, and weaponize whatever you have on hand. There are no rules except for one: knock the other person off their hog before they can do the same to you. But if you fail, it's no problem. Ben knows how to take a licking. Even if someone pulls a chainsaw on Ben, he'll just shrug it off, dust himself down, get up, get on his bike, and get going again.

I've always had a soft spot for Full Throttle. I continue to love it still. Sure, it suffers from some of the genre's fallacies. But it was -and still is- wonderfully sharp-witted, deliciously funny, and tautly plotted. Enough of my yapping, though. Full Throttle has a tank full of fuel and a whole world to show you. Get going. The Polecats are waiting.
 
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Boleskine

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https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/32718

Full Throttle Remastered review
The Good:
Setting and atmosphere unlike anything else in mainstream gaming; stellar licensed soundtrack fits the mood perfectly; varied and colorful cast of desert-dwelling tough-guy types, brought to life with some spot-on vocal performances.

The Bad:
Repetitive arcade action sequences with clunky controls; the high level of technical polish on the original minimizes the improvements of the remake.



4 stars out of 5
Scoring System - Editorial Policies
Our Verdict:

Full Throttle is another cherished page from the annals of genre history restored for a brand new audience. Though the remake will have limited appeal to those familiar with the highly polished original, the game belongs in the library of every adventure gamer, and it’s as enjoyable now as it was two decades ago.

Written by Pascal Tekaia — May 15, 2017

Many of us playing adventure games today probably got our start during the genre’s Golden Age, cutting our teeth on classic point-and-click adventures from LucasArts and Sierra. By the time Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle co-designer Tim Schafer was kicking the tires of his new biker-themed graphic adventure, the genre was transitioning to the medium of CD-ROMs, allowing for noticeable advancements in graphics, audio, and overall quality of presentation. Full Throttle, when it released in 1995, took advantage of this, with full motion animation, a complete voice cast, and a suitably Rockabilly soundtrack featuring The Gone Jackals. More than two decades later, the remastered version still provides all the humor, memorable cast of characters, and grit ‘n’ gravel action of the original, though it may just be too faithful for its own good, as the less desirable design decisions occasionally found in its precursor remain along for the ride.

The world of Full Throttle is a mercilessly dreary one, with good reason. As Schafer mentions in the remake’s optional commentary track, it is a world modeled after the wasteland of the Mad Max universe. The game’s locales feature all the accoutrements one would expect of a dust-and-asphalt desert, like broken-down trailers, rusty water towers, seedy bars, shadowy canyon roads, and gaping chasms, though its unapologetic desolation and solitude can wear on you after a while. The cowardly murder of Malcolm Corley, owner of biker-friendly Corley Motors and one of the last champions of rubber-meets-road modes of transportation (think Harley Davidson), has been blamed squarely on the leader of the Polecats biker gang, Ben. On the run from corrupt authorities and corporate henchmen, Ben must find the true heir to the Corley Motors fortune and expose the real murderer to prove his innocence.

Full Throttle has developed a reputation for being short, and compared to a score of other LucasArts classics its five-hour runtime won’t win any records, but dismissing it due to its length would be a mistake. The majority of the game takes place in well-crafted point-and-click environments and cinematic set pieces. From a rural mechanic’s shop to the cavernous CEO’s office at Corley Motors; from a destruction derby to an abandoned mink farm, the wasteland fires new challenges and scenery at you at a pretty brisk pace. Ben can travel between the four or so main area hubs on his hog, then visit individual scenes at each location on foot, solving inventory-based puzzles along the way.

Progress is paced via bookmarking at certain points. For example, early in the game, Ben’s bike is mangled after a major crash, and you are confined to the starting area until a series of puzzles and interactions have been solved to procure the parts necessary to repair it. Later in the game, another sequence of events is designed to upgrade the bike in order to be able to jump a demolished bridge. This is a one-way jump, and it opens up the game’s final area, from which there is no turning back.

The game uses a contextual interaction menu appearing on-screen when an interactive object is clicked on. This system, which incorporates basic commands like “Look” and “Kick” in a Polecats emblem, is a natural fit for home console versions of the remake. The puzzles themselves range from simple to clever. Figuring out what a rubber hose and empty gas can are for is pretty straightforward, but finding a use for a box of fluffy battery-operated bunnies or infiltrating a heavily-fortified junkyard requires a good bit more ingenuity. Still, the locations available for each objective are often somewhat limited, so your inventory never grows to the point of being unmanageable, and there are usually only a certain number of possible tools available for any given job, so even the trickier puzzles can be worked out using process of elimination.

Less palatable are the more arcade-ish elements laced throughout. The (pretty epic) final showdown, for instance, operates on an unseen timer, and will result in a game-over if not successfully resolved. This could be likened to an early predecessor of today’s Quick Time Events. Thankfully, failing a critical obstacle will simply restore the game to a save state from moments earlier. The greatest departure from the traditional gameplay formula involves a couple of “action” sequences you must participate in. One such section sees Ben motor down a dusty stretch of highway, getting into physical fights with other bikers while burning rubber. This works a bit like rock-paper-scissors in that each biker gives up his or her weapon when beaten, which can be used to take out someone further up the totem pole. In execution, however, this sequence lacks a clear directive; winning bouts seems to depend as much on awkwardly-implemented timed button presses as it does on weapon selection and luck. It just isn’t fun, and takes way too long to progress through. A later scene where Ben participates in a Destruction Derby is equally frustrating due to unresponsive controls and a poorly clued objective.

One benefit of these sections is seeing Ben interact with the competing biker gangs Full Throttle brings to the table. Apart from Ben’s Polecats there are the Vultures, the Cavefish, and the Rottwheelers. Each one is easily identifiable by a unique look, emblem, bike type, and even uniform. The hostile rivalry between gangs is only one backdrop for the colorful characters populating this otherwise barren world, however. There’s also Adrian Ripburger, Malcolm Corley’s stiff corporate counterpart, as well as his goons Bolus and Nestor, who have a real brains-and-brawn relationship. Then there’s Maureen, the mechanic who becomes a potential romantic interest for Ben after she fixes up his wrecked bike, and Father Torque, the grizzled former leader of the Polecats, now retired, riding into sunsets and completely stealing scenes on a daily basis.

The cast is brought to life with deft voice performances, particularly the gravelly growl given to Ben by the late Roy Conrad, and Mark Hamill doing a Joker-ish Ripburger. All of the voiced dialog is lifted right from the original game, with the remake’s audio coming across crisper, sharper, and without the slight echo apparent in its predecessor. Toggling between the original and new HD graphics at any time, even mid-cinematic, switches the sound quality back and forth as well. The game’s soundtrack, perhaps one of its most iconic characteristics, remains a master class in licensed music. While the original score works well in calmer gameplay scenes, it’s The Gone Jackals’ raucous rock ‘n’ roll that truly sets the stage for this heavy metal desert outlaw adventure; the manic guitar riffs that kick in during action scenes or just when Ben takes to the road again create that rarest of feelings associated with a graphic adventure: badassery.

Much like the audio, the game’s visuals have received an overhaul. Though the difference seems fairly subtle, every single scene has been completely re-painted, smoothing out previously jagged edges and expanding past the image borders into a widescreen format. However, purists need not fear, because while everything has been updated, not a single pixel has actually been altered from its initial inception. (And, of course, the original graphics have been preserved intact, if you prefer to play that way instead.) The in-game animation is the single largest beneficiary of this process, as the earlier version didn’t stand the test of time quite as well as the background art. These improvements take a game that already looked and sounded great in 1995 and bring it fully into the twenty-first century without losing its hand-painted appeal.

If you haven’t yet had the pleasure of playing Full Throttle, the remaster offers a welcome second chance to check out this one-of-a-kind adventure for yourself. For existing fans of the game, it could potentially be a harder sell on a technical level, facing a much narrower gap to bridge than some of Double Fine’s other LucasArts re-releases. In staying unwaveringly true to its predecessor, it even carries over a few of the less desirable arcade qualities unchanged. However, it’s still worth it to re-experience not just a part of graphic adventure history, but to get an utterly unique and wonderfully tongue-in-cheek game to boot. Get pulled back in by new features such as the developer’s commentary track, an image gallery, and a fully functional soundtrack jukebox, then stay a second (or third, or fourth) time for the memorable characters, witty point-and-click puzzle gameplay, and biker-themed setting that’s unmistakably Schafer through and through.
 

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http://www.pcgamer.com/tim-schafer-on-the-making-of-full-throttle/

Tim Schafer on the making of Full Throttle
How Mad Max, Yojimbo and Hellboy influenced the creation of a classic.

In 1995 LucasArts released Full Throttle, a point-and-click adventure with a difference. You weren’t playing as a lovable goofball like Bernard Bernoulli from Day of the Tentacle or Monkey Island’s Guybrush Threepwood, you were a tough, gruff biker called Ben who used his fists and feet as much as his brain.

At the time a LucasArts adventure was expected to sell around 100,000 copies, but Full Throttle sold over a million. And now, 22 years later, the game has been re-released with remastered graphics and audio. I ask the game’s writer/director Tim Schafer what it’s like going back to something he made when he was in his early 20s.

“It’s been interesting looking at how I wrote dialogue back then based on my life experiences at the time, and how I interpret it differently now that I’m older,” he says. “And now that I’ve actually been a biker on the run for a crime I didn’t commit, that adds a lot of depth to it too. I had no idea what that was like back then.”

Full Throttle was a huge leap from Day of the Tentacle, with fullscreen animation, 3D models, and lavish production values. “We got a lot more ambitious,” says Schafer. “We had all these kinetic, cinematic chase scenes with 3D vehicles, and that scope really hit us hard when we realised how much time it would take to make. We tried cutting some stuff, but it was still a huge, expensive project.”

But he still has fond memories of working on the game, particularly how encouraging LucasArts was. “We got the support we needed to make the game great,” he says. “Quality was always the number one thing there, and that came from the top. George Lucas and ILM weren’t making B-movies, so we couldn’t make B-games. We had this idea that we had to be the best and that was something George made clear in his directives to LucasArts.”

Even though Full Throttle isn’t set in a post-apocalyptic world, it has a desolate, hopeless quality usually found in that kind of fiction. “We were definitely inspired by Mad Max, but not in the sense that the world’s a wasteland. It was mainly the stoicism of Max as this tough guy hero. He’s capable and smart, but calm and quiet too. He’s not looking for trouble, but it always finds him.”

The Mad Max influence also extends to the direction of the cutscenes. “Strapping the camera to these outrageous vehicles, low to the ground, making everything feel super fast.” And the game’s memorable intro sequence, which begins with a shot of an empty road and a melancholy narration, was a tribute to the beginning of Mad Max 2, as well as biker film The Wild One.

The Akira Kurosawa film Yojimbo was another cinematic inspiration, both for Ben and the general tone of the game. “Toshiro Mifune’s character is an out-of-work samurai just looking to get by, and he keeps getting stuck in the middle of these warring clans and other situations that force him to reluctantly unsheathe his sword.”

Artistically, Full Throttle still holds up. Longtime Schafer collaborator Peter Chan, who was also responsible for some of the most memorable visuals in Grim Fandango, was the lead artist. “We loved making Day of the Tentacle look like a Chuck Jones cartoon, but a lot of people thought it was too childish,” says Schafer. “So with Throttle we wondered if we could do cartoony, but for adults.”

Chan looked to Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comics for inspiration. “His backgrounds are really minimal, with a lot of silhouettes and dark spaces that draw your eye to the characters and the focal point of the scene,” says Schafer. “He was definitely one of the biggest influences on the look of the game.”

Full Throttle is also unique in the sense that there’s no great, looming threat the hero has to deal with. It’s a small, personal story about a fading way of life. “It’s so tempting when writing a story to have the world be in danger,” says Schafer. “It’s a workable plot device. But biker culture’s kind of nihilistic, so I thought about what would end the world of a biker. And that would be if the only maker of motorcycles in the country switched over to making hovering minivans. It would be such an affront to everything they believe in.”

The voice acting of the late Roy Conrad is part of what makes Ben such a memorable and beloved character, and I ask Schafer what he remembers about casting him. “We had all these audition tapes, and a lot of people were playing Ben as this over-the-top tough guy,” he says. “But Roy didn’t. He was stoic, stern, and had this quality of a guy who just wants to be left alone. He’s almost gentle, but he has this rich, deep, resonance to his voice.”

And the music by biker band The Gone Jackals, particularly the theme song, Legacy, is another important part of the game’s magic. “Keith Karloff, the band’s founder and frontman, rode up on his Harley and handed the tapes to composer Peter McConnell, and that was it. He knew the culture, he knew the sound, and he knew a bunch of biker guys. We’d meet his friends and tape microphones to their motorcycles and ride them around town.”

Full Throttle also saw a shift from the old ‘wall of verbs’ interface that was seen in the likes of Day of the Tentacle to something much more streamlined and visual. I ask Schafer about the thinking behind this. “We wanted to have more real estate for the presentation,” he begins. “The artists wanted to fill the screen with art. Also, looking up and down constantly distracts from your immersion. So we thought: why can’t the verbs just appear right where your cursor is? Because that’s where your eye is. And that’s where the idea came from.” Schafer notes that when The Curse of Monkey Island used the same interface later, the development team used a coin, and now people refer to it as a verb coin. “That’s wrong!” he laughs. “It’s a verb skull!”

As for remastering Full Throttle for a new generation, Schafer says he wants to remain true to the original game. “It’s a collaboration of a bunch of artists coming together. The acting, the writing, the sound design, the music. All these people worked together to make this thing, and we don’t want to mess with it. We just want to present it in the best way possible, and make it more true to the original intentions. We’re getting rid of artefacts, compression, and old tech to make it look like it looked in our minds.”
 

LESS T_T

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https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/Yuj...ll_Throttle_Remastered_Curating_a_Classic.php

Full Throttle Remastered: Curating a Classic

Striking the balance in the production of a video game remaster is tricky business. You can easily please as many fans as you disappoint. With modern tools and technology, gamers’ expectations bounce between revisionism and purism.

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Double Fine’s high-level vision for its remasters in terms of the visuals have always leaned toward purism rather than revisionism, because the original was a design-driven process rather than a tech driven process.

“We wanna keep true to the original work of art. It’s a collaboration of a bunch of artists coming together. The acting, the writing, the sound design, the music, the animation. All these people worked together to make this thing, and we don’t wanna mess with it. We just want to present it in the best way possible, and make it more true to the original intentions. We’re getting rid of artefacts, compression, and ageing technology to make it look like it looks in our minds.” —Tim Schafer, PCMag by Andy Kelly

Thus, taking a revisionist approach simply because we have better tools and technology is undesirable, since it could alter or contradict the original vision for the video game and possibly undermine the elements that made the video game such a beloved title in the first place. Clearly that would be a mistake.

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“I don’t really like the idea of making up stuff that’s not in the original ‘finished’ art. . . . My wish is to keep it as true as possible . . . but with some helpful blending and pixel wrangling.” —Peter Chan

Which isn’t to say that technology does not influence the visuals, but any compromise or advantage that technology offers is incorporated into a deliberate visual style.

“You have to understand 3D modeling was being incorporated. . . . My conundrum was to find a way to have the 3D models and backgrounds live well together. Since the 3D models were simple and chunky, I knew my backgrounds had to have the same limitations. So I chose a more monochromatic color palette. I also chose hard lighting to create spotlights and dark black shadows (first time being introduced to Mike Mignola’s art style and lighting). The hard lighting forced my designs to stay simple, only needing three values (highlight, medium, shadow). . . . I thought by doing this, the 3D models would fit seamlessly with my backgrounds.” —Peter Chan

Thus, in remastering Full Throttle, we took a curator’s approach, delving into the design decisions and thought process of the original designers to immerse ourselves in the world that they originally created. The goal is to understand Full Throttle’s world as the original designers’ envisioned it at the time, rather than how they actually expressed it in 8-bit. Acquiring this insight allows us to vet our remastering approach and any production hiccups against the original design. Fortunately we have access to physical assets archived by LucasArts, including original concepts, source files used by the original team, etc.

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Even better, we have access to key members of the original development team, such as Tim Schafer, Peter Chan, and Larry Ahern.

But, as with all best-laid plans, complications inevitably arise. In this case, there were complications due to requirements of current video game platform technologies, unexpected results during the process of remastering, or a very strong desire on the part of the original designers to make a change to something that they considered fundamentally lacking. So the challenge for us was to reconcile those inevitable changes and embellishments with the original vision of the Full Throttle world.


Backgrounds:

“. . . Imagine FT style being somewhat slick, chiseled with a little sandy grit thrown in.” —Peter Chan

“We loved making Day of the Tentacle look like a classic Chuck Jones cartoon, but a lot of people thought it was too childish. We didn’t really care, ‘cause we thought it looked awesome, but it turned some people off. So with Throttle we wondered if we could do cartoony, but for adults. This is when we started using the term ‘stylised’ more often. Not photorealistic, but not for kids either.” —Tim Schafer, PCMag by Andy Kelly

The backgrounds for Full Throttle, while “slick and chiseled,” were not as hard-edged, clean, and flat as Day of the Tentacle’s. There were more texture and material details in the Full Throttle style; the “sandy grit thrown in.” They were just suggested or alluded to, however, and not intended to be high-detailed or photo-realistic, as Tim noted. The velvet wallpaper and carpet in Corley’s or the wooden slats on the Kickstand, for example.

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For this reason, we decided to approach the backgrounds in a painterly, alla prima manner. This allowed for harder edges and large areas of pure colors, but with “gestural” details.

Upward of a dozen artists were involved over several months to digitally repaint nearly 200 backgrounds at high-resolution and with widened aspect ratios (the original game was in 4:3).


Characters:

The approach to remastering the characters was more straightforward; the line and hard-edged-color style were clear on Full Throttle thanks to all the in game close-ups. The relatively small cast of characters also allowed us to iterate on master character sheets with the original character artist, Larry Ahern. Thus, any questions during the remaster process created by lack of detail due to the low resolution of the original or any necessary additions or embellishments were easily answered by referring to the remastered character sheets.

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The major challenges of remastering the characters came in the form of logistical and technical issues. Managing continuity and consistency on a tight schedule and within a technically complex authoring pipeline necessitated by a now archaic animation engine was a source of much hand-wringing and bug fixing. Upwards of 30 artists were involved in re-drawing over 8000 unique frames of animation over many months.


3D Assets:

The biggest visual change for Full Throttle (and perhaps the most pined over) came with the rendering of 3D assets for Full Motion Videos (FMVs). Modern toon shading could be applied to bring the vehicles and 3D “Ben-on-his-bike” closer to the style of the character art while rigging allowed animators to animate Ben to remove the arm distortion in the original when the bike turned. Most of this was barely visible in the original, but laughably obvious at 4K resolution.

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Terrains were also updated, as the decision was made that the original modeled or hand-animated originals, whilst faithfully remastered, did not hold up in terms of consistency and fidelity at 4K.

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The 3D remastering pushed the limits of our prime directive, but vetting them against the original vision of Full Throttle with Double Fine kept it true in its design.

There are approximately 445 individual FMV “cuts” that constituted approximately 134 full FMVs.


Conclusion:

Curating and remastering the original art assets from Full Throttle was a significantly large undertaking from a production standpoint; kudos to Double Fine for dedicating so much awesome talent and resources to bringing this classic to 21st century audiences. As a curator of sorts, “walking a mile” in Tim, Peter, and Larry’s shoes was fascinating and informative. I’ve often considered a video game to be as much a record of a team’s experiences as it is a piece of entertainment. Where a video game shines or falls short generally reflects the production or design successes and hardships, in my experience. While not apparent to most consumers, as a developer, I find they can be quite a learning experience. To paint over Peter’s original backgrounds, for example, is to (quite literally) retrace his decision-making process as an artist. Sometimes it uncovers funny details that you might not notice while playing through the game or reveals some design technique that you may not have considered in your own work. On a macro level, deconstructing the original FMVs and rebuilding that pipeline, even with modern tools, were extremely challenging (see Trevor Diem’s blog post); we walked away with a great appreciation for the original team. “How did they manage to get this done back in 1995?!” was a phrase I found myself repeating during late-night debugging sessions; totally flabbergasted.
 

Dexter

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Finally got around to play this. I played the Demo back in the day, which was weirdly cut together between Ben making his way out of the dumpster and questioning the barkeep, having a road fight and stealing the ramp with all the in-between parts left out:


Whenever I tried playing the full game (and I think I did several times with years between) it would always crash at one of the early Cutscenes and that'd be the end of it.

Probably the weakest LucasArts Adventure I played and I can finally understand it's somewhat dubious reputation/reception around Launch.

Really short, if you're not trying to trigger every verb interaction and do all the stuff you can probably finish it in 3-4 hours, otherwise it's like 5. There's Demos for other games that are longer.
Some very questionable design choices, from the Rock/Paper/Scissors road fights trying to introduce some "Action" into the game to the ending of the game that has you guess-clicking around in interfaces/some other Trial & Error puzzles and some eh Minigames like the Demolition Derby thing. Also barely any humor that lands.
Only has like 2 "Quest Hubs" with like a dozen screens if you want to call them that. Was somewhat surprised to see the game tell me that I'm already 33% through after I had just finished the short introduction.
 

Lagole Gon

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Full Throttle has a special place in my heart. My uncle borrowed it from some bourge student, it probably was one of very few copies of the game in potato at that time.
I still find the general art direction and the setting very appealing. There's this... gritty masculine romanticism to it.

on the road for days
two wheels, an engine, and me
I don't brush my teeth
 
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