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Full Throttle Remastered

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Completed the remastered version two days ago. I was really surprised to see my game timer in Gog Galaxy state that I completed the game after just four hours of playing. Didn't remember it being that short, but the game is quite short indeed. You can really see that they had to cut a lot of content in the 90's to get the game finished in the tight schedule.

 

There are some sloppy things that bother me with the remaster, but I really love the remastered audio.

 

By the way, where's the demo of Full Throttle that Schafer said they found and remastered also?

 

I'll have to now go through all the commentary audios now as well as concept art and the musics in the bonus menu.

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Have they talked about cut content before? I didn't know there was any but I would love to know what was taken out.

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Off the top of my head there was a hallucination sequence where Ben took peyote and had to navigate through his vision, and a biker gang that lived on water or something.

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I'm very happy with the remaster.  My main objection was the harsh way audio transitions at the end of cutscenes, as gerbil points out.

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The peyote scene is interesting to read if you've played Deponia, which features a very specific hallucinating-on-drugs scene set in a similar desolate industrial wasteland. Perhaps a Full Throttle fan (likely, actually) worked on it and decided to make that cut content come true.

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I watched The Wild One yesterday. I was vaguely aware it had some influence on Tim and Full Throttle, but it's so obvious when you compare their intros that it made me smile. The film starts with a shot of an empty stretch of road and Brando's voice wistfully remembering about a girl.

 

The film itself is just okay - probably remembered more because of Brando in leathers and a few special lines than its overall quality. It's also sometimes held as a possible source for The Beatles' band name (the girls in Lee Marvin's gang are referred to as 'the Beetles').

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There's a commentary track saying this Ricky Myron scene was cut. It's not clear if it was some kind of flashback or something you watch him do and see him jump the bridge.

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Huh. Maybe there was a vidscreen rather than the point of interest sign that would give you the same clues but via a video?

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7 hours ago, Ben X said:

Huh. Maybe there was a vidscreen rather than the point of interest sign that would give you the same clues but via a video?

 

Itd be more hardcore if it just flashed back to a cutscene for no reason. An intercut silent flashback like that, happening as someone in the present recounts the tale would feel aesthetically at home in the Mad Max aesthetic. 

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True, although depending on whether it included necessary clues or not and whether it was repeatable, it might have felt unfair, redundant or weird. Which I guess would explain why it was cut!

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Maybe I'm reading too into it but since the commentary is listened to in the bridge area, I imagined some kind of black and white flashback to Ricky Myron jumping the bridge.


Also thought they could have just been saying Ben would have got there and Ricky Myron was hanging out jumping the bridge first, but nahhhhhhhhhhh I'm not putting my lips on that.

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Well okay, after doing my playthrough with commentary, I switched back and forth a lot and I'm actually pretty annoyed how sloppy a lot of the backgrounds and drawings tend to be. Besides the three puzzles ruined by graphical errors, I started noticing stuff beyond bad drawings like things overlapping slightly wrong and shadows that were either missing or just solid opacity or just too many backgrounds obviously processed through a filter with very little human touch. There's also points where they could have taken the time to make stuff better instead of processing it. Like what the fuck happened to the font? It's no longer pixelated but it's fucking vector art trash. Why? Could no one purchase a cool font? Why not make the end credits look great?

 

There's the fucking video screen puzzles are all just distracting and awful because the text is falling outside of the bounds of the screen. How do you not catch that shit before release? And even then if you switch back they used a skinnier font in the original game so it fit. Even then, if they change the font for the HD version, why not add an extra touch of having the font curve with the CRT screen? Now it looks more fucked up and out of place. Same with Ben's jacket. I guess they were completely against having the Polecats logo or the "Full Throttle" text ever fit the curvature of his jacket even though that literally takes a minute to do in Photoshop or Illustrator or whatever they were using to redraw. Clouds don't move and even then they are never really facing the way the action is staged in the original, someone just drew flat horizontal clouds for almost every part and called it a day.

 

I think maybe this release is a bit of a let down because while the new 3D looks impeccable, the good drawings didn't age the way zoomed out non cartoony sprites like the SCUMM games before did. So you just find yourself switching to the older screen and seeing how much someone had a better grasp of what they were animating or making their characters look consistent. There's too many cartoony sausage fingers in a game that is stylized but not like that. That Cave Fish animation where the dude blows himself up after he loses the drawings and animation are just wretched. The part where Ripburger is talking from the back of his head looking down at the demolition derby looks good until it's animated and becomes a blob of shapes kind of moving around in a bunch of ways that do not indicate a human is speaking dialogue from the back of their head.

 

And fuck, why are the new splash screens at the beginning so atrocious? All of the characters have such bad looks and it so amatuerish. The first one of course has the three bikers with the Double Fine and outsourcing company logos not wrapped around their jackets and looks just as messy.

 

I don't know, I am confused why this has happened? Time and money I'm sure. I guess when the Monkey Island remasters at LucasArts were trash I understood because it was a bunch of people at a company who had no connection to the original games and were just quickly outsourcing it on the cheap to get it done. Meanwhile Telltale is making Tales which is brilliant and shows their knack for doing it on the cheap and still having an atmospheric and engaging game.

 

So with Double Fine, considering the previous remasters, I would have thought Tim would have cared more about this game since it seems to be more personal than Day of the Tentacle at least. I guess it is more work, they made it widescreen, there's way more cutscene animation and closeups. So I can understand if it ended up being a way larger undertaking than necessary. But then it makes this remaster feel unnecessary. Perhaps it's just whatever companies they were outsourcing too were just not skilled enough. Or whoever at Double Fine doing the 2D art is not skilled enough? I don't know much about the animators there or if any of this is even done in house at DF at this point. It could really just be it's fucking Peter Chan, Larry Ahern, Anson Jew, and Peter Tsackel and they are all fucking brilliant and it shows even through 320x240 resolution and it's hard to ask a bunch of new blood to top a happenstance of those creatives in a group? I don't know.

 

But hey the original game is still in there, also remastered music and sound is very well done.

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I'm bumping this from oblivion because I just finished Full Throttle for the first time. Which essentially wraps-up my twenty year journey into the LucasArts and LucasArts+ adventure game library. 

 

It was a good game. Harmed by a poor design choice or two, sure; I couldn't find the junkyard crane because the game did everything in its power to make sure I didn't notice it. Odd criticisms, here and there. They don't really matter.

 

As denouement, though, it is fitting. Flawed, a little rough, but wonderful. Much like the LucasArts+ catalogue.

 

I'd postponed Full Throttle intentionally. Once Telltale stopped being Telltale, I held onto it more. It was the last of the LucasArts classics—sans Loom and the B-ist of B-sides, The Dig—and I wasn't ready to quite let go. Those games meant—do mean—the world to me; they were a comfort and a joy, and I looking back at them I feel the same warm happiness that an old favourite book or movie inspires. Watching the credits, I got a little nostalgic—you see names like Jonathan Ackley, Larry Ahern, Mike Stemmle, Peter Chan, etc. knowing the great games they'd done and have done since. Got my nerd on there.

 

Anyway, it's a surreal, bittersweet feeling; I've been in this fan community for 20 years (since I was eight), and I feel something precious has been lost. The upside is all the wonderful stuff being put out by other people (many of whom are members on this forum). I can't wait to try Time Gentlemen, Please! (I loved Ben There, Dan That) and the few Wadjet Eye games I have remaining. Campo Santo. Odds and ends.

 

But I'll miss the LucasArts library. I do wonder if they ever realised they were creating something wonderful, back then. I suspect they didn't.

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Full Throttle easily gets the award for coolest intro, though. Sorry, Monkey Island.

 

(Telltale came close with Sam & Max. And "My Style" from Strong Bad is still catchy as all hell.)

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I just played this for the first time and it was really disappointing. It feels very empty compared to most Lucasarts adventure games with few characters, repetitive settings, less objects and hot-spots to interact with, less lines of dialogue. I get that Ben is very taciturn and can't be a quip machine like Guybrush Threepwood but it feels like most attempts to interact with the world are met with the same 4 dismissive lines, which makes me not want to try anything. Even in situations where it makes no sense he'll fall back on the same lines, like when I was trying to use my bike chain on the semi-truck during the climax and he replied "I'm saving that chain for my friends on Mine Road."

And Peter Chan's art is beautiful but scene layouts are often at the expense of clarity, like the magnet tower Thyroid mentioned or trying to figure out where the gas cap on the security force hovercar is supposed to be. Between the lack of humorous bespoke dialogue and hard to parse scenes (oh, that tiny little square in the trailer is a cabinet?) it feels like the game wants to make it hard for me to play. Same with some of the puzzle design: I get a steak and instantly know I'm going to use it to distract the junkyard dog but when I try to use it on a nearby car Ben informs me that the dog would eat the steak and then eat him. Ok, so throwing the steak into a car isn't the answer, so I bash my head against the scene for 15 minutes (luckily the remaster lets me skip the animation of Ben getting chased by the dog, no way I could watch that 15 times in a row without turning the game off) until I give up and look up a FAQ. Turns out I was supposed to throw the steak into a DIFFERENT car. That sort of thing happened half a dozen times, where I figured out what I was supposed to do (bunny minefield was another big one) and then spent a while trying to figure out the exact specific way the game wanted me to do it.

 

It's clear the focus is story and I had heard great things about it, especially Mo and Ben's relationship, but even that was a little underwhelming: there's barely any meat there. They have a brief conversation when Mo finds him, don't really interact again until he finds the Vultures hangout, and then they pull off their motorcycle heist and there's a finale. I like that the sexual tension is ambiguous and that the game doesn't spell anything but they're both too unemotive for that ending to really mean much.

 

There's a lot I liked (art, music, the more cinematic approach) but overall I found it missing most of what made me fall in love with Lucasarts adventure games.

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I played the remastered Full Throttle and I gotta say that it's indeed less cool than I remember. I guess the teenage me was more easily impressed. I liked the visuals a lot, though. In some sections they make a subtle improvement while staying close to original. I checked walkthrough several times because of being stuck on a dumb thing... I think it's still a good game, maybe not a great one.

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