Full Throttle Remastered

[syntheticgerbil]

I think I played that demo many times, It's where you first figure out that stupid ramp puzzle right? It came in handy so I didn't waste time in the main game for sure.

 

Also the only remaster I really want is just fucking Sam and Max. It would look so good with crisp graphics. I don't think anyone at Double Fine worked on that though. They all moved on to Telltale and Steve Purcell is at Pixar.

  On 3/15/2017 at 7:08 PM, Simon said:

I can't picture a faithful remaster of The Secret of Monkey Island or Loom in the same sense as DoTT or Full Throttle. There's a different visual language to the earlier games, whereas once the games started to resemble cartoon animation (like the latter two, and Sam & Max), you can see the technical room for improvement. It's okay to tidy up the large character sprites with jagged outlines and make DoTT feel more like a Tex Avery cartoon, because that's what it was aiming for in the first place.

I agree, it seems like it was kind of pointless to remaster the first two Monkey Islands, although I do really like their repaints of the backgrounds in the second one. The scanned backgrounds of 2 were really the only thing that felt like it could easily be higher res. There was too much left for interpretation and I guess there's always a push to make everything have elements of CMI now, even though I sort of like that one the second least in terms of character design and some art direction.

I do worry about some of the cleanup I have seen so far in the Full Throttle remaster stuff, concerned line widths on the screen and the off color 3D of the bike, but hopefully that is all fixed. I loved the DoTT remaster so fucking much. It's exactly how it should be now in my opinion.

[Simon]

In this new GOG interview (which begins with its host playing along to the Gone Jackals 'Legacy' on a keytar), Tim does seem open to updating other LEC titles if he can get enough of the original teams involved in each case.

 

For reasons I went into above, Sam & Max is the only one left that isn't fraught with the problem of over-interpretation. I agree with @syntheticgerbil that DoTT Remastered was spot-on (down to thoughtful detail like how you could mix the interface - I played it with new graphics/old interface on iPad), in a way that Full Throttle is not quite looking, but it does does give me hope that Sam & Max would work. 

(Side note: I miss them. Really wish Steve was able to put out a new comic every now and then.)

[Jake]

  On 3/24/2017 at 10:44 PM, Simon said:

In this new GOG interview (which begins with its host playing along to the Gone Jackals 'Legacy' on a keytar), Tim does seem open to updating other LEC titles if he can get enough of the original teams involved in each case.

 

For reasons I went into above, Sam & Max is the only one left that isn't fraught with the problem of over-interpretation. I agree with @syntheticgerbil that DoTT Remastered was spot-on (down to thoughtful detail like how you could mix the interface - I played it with new graphics/old interface on iPad), in a way that Full Throttle is not quite looking, but it does does give me hope that Sam & Max would work. 

(Side note: I miss them. Really wish Steve was able to put out a new comic every now and then.)

Strongly recommend joining the Sam & Max Funhouse on Facebook. No full comics but Steve posts a lot. 

[tabacco]

(https://www.facebook.com/Sam-Max-Funhouse-515143335211633/)

[Simon]

Thanks @Jake and @tabacco, joined! I wondered why Steve's blogs had gone a bit quiet and didn't know about this - it's great. 

 

Time really flies...unless I've missed something, Jake's episode of The Devil's Playhouse was the last Sam & Max story thus far and that was 2010.

[syntheticgerbil]

  On 3/25/2017 at 2:59 AM, Jake said:

Strongly recommend joining the Sam & Max Funhouse on Facebook. No full comics but Steve posts a lot. 

Fucking shit, thanks for the refresher. I apparently had already liked that page but I think I only added it after the unreleased Max gets shot strip was posted. I have other pages of this strip but not the ones posted there.

[Kolzig]

Mmmmmmmmmmmoooooorrrreeeee gaaaammmmeeeesssss!

 

Full Throttle is out today. I wonder when will I find time to play, but there it sits in my GOG library. Would've doubledipped on PS Vita, but strangely Double Fine decided not to offer launch discount for Europe, they did give discount to Americans.

[Cordeos]

  On 4/18/2017 at 6:51 PM, Kolzig said:

Mmmmmmmmmmmoooooorrrreeeee gaaaammmmeeeesssss!

 

Full Throttle is out today. I wonder when will I find time to play, but there it sits in my GOG library. Would've doubledipped on PS Vita, but strangely Double Fine decided not to offer launch discount for Europe, they did give discount to Americans.

I am playing it now, I obviously played too much as a kid, I have remembered every solution so far lol

[Moosferatu]

Just finished. They did a great job! I'd forgotten about the haiku at the end. Delightful. 

[Cordeos]

  On 4/18/2017 at 7:15 PM, Moosferatu said:

Just finished. They did a great job! I'd forgotten about the haiku at the end. Delightful. 

Ditto, turns out i remember everything

[BigJKO]

Just played it for a bit yesterday. I find it mixed in quality, but mostly they did a great job. The cutscenes and closeups look great! That intro was almost perfect, felt like what the original game looked like in my head.

 

There's the odd character drawings that just look a bit rubbish, with weird hands and faces. Widescreen-ing the backgrounds creates a slightly more empty composition in some of the scenes, like outside Marley's shack. The biggest bummer is that they went through the trouble of re-rendering all the 3d models but lit them so flatly with almost no black shadows. It's super pronounced when the security drone chopper flies in. The render looks like a daytime render, the underside of the drone chopper is brightly lit when in the original it was all in harsh black shadows like the rest of the world. For all the flak the 3d models caught in the original for looking very CGI compared to the rest, the lighting they did on them back then was much better than in the remaster.

[Jake]

  On 4/19/2017 at 7:38 AM, BigJKO said:

Just played it for a bit yesterday. I find it mixed in quality, but mostly they did a great job. The cutscenes and closeups look great! That intro was almost perfect, felt like what the original game looked like in my head.

 

There's the odd character drawings that just look a bit rubbish, with weird hands and faces. Widescreen-ing the backgrounds creates a slightly more empty composition in some of the scenes, like outside Marley's shack. The biggest bummer is that they went through the trouble of re-rendering all the 3d models but lit them so flatly with almost no black shadows. It's super pronounced when the security drone chopper flies in. The render looks like a daytime render, the underside of the drone chopper is brightly lit when in the original it was all in harsh black shadows like the rest of the world. For all the flak the 3d models caught in the original for looking very CGI compared to the rest, the lighting they did on them back then was much better than in the remaster.

 

[Moosferatu]

Yeah, there were a few instances where the redrawn/3d stuff could have been better. For me, the worst of it was the demolition derby. None of it looked very good. But, on the whole the game looks good.

[Cordeos]

  On 4/19/2017 at 1:37 PM, Moosferatu said:

Yeah, there were a few instances where the redrawn/3d stuff could have been better. For me, the worst of it was the demolition derby. None of it looked very good. But, on the whole the game looks good.

Might be that I was playing the game clandestinely at work, it was a slow day I swear, but I didn't really notice it. I also remember the CG graphics in the original being janky so perhaps my brain just glossed over it.

[Kolzig]

One thing that bothers me is that it says Swtich Render Mode in the controls menu. How can that go through Q&A before launch?

 

Ahh the remastered audio is so damn good in this game.

[BigJKO]

Yeah, the remastered audio/music is really good. And listening to the commentary is so much fun.

[elmuerte]

Checked out the first 10 minutes. It was not until I pressed F1 my mind registered the remastering of everything. Looking forward to the play the other minutes.

[jennegatron]

I played this for the first time with the release of the remaster. The only positive thing I really have to say about it is: I'm glad it's short.

[Simon]

  On 4/23/2017 at 6:33 PM, jennegatron said:

I played this for the first time with the release of the remaster. The only positive thing I really have to say about it is: I'm glad it's short.

 

I'm curious! I'm not playing the remaster but am pretty familiar with the game. What didn't you like?

 

I can try to put nostalgia aside (first game I bought with my own money!) and admit this is a little uneven and not among LucasArts' very best - I wish more of the game was like Melonweed, where it briefly opens up a bit, and has a couple of strong puzzles. But I do enjoy the characters (perfect dialogue and voice acting) and the overall cinematic feel - I'm sad when it's over so soon.

[jennegatron]

Alright! Below contains story & puzzle spoilers, so if someone hasn't played it, don't open this up

  Reveal hidden contents

• Too much of this game is bullshit minigames that are unfun and waste lots of time.
  • the bumper car version of the monster truck rally is dog shit. you're given no instruction on how to do it, it feels incredibly bad to control. 
  • the 'hitting the other people on the bikes' puzzle/minigame is weird & unnecessary. It filled my inventory with too many weapons meaning i had to retry all the combinations with the cavefish and the fast guys. It didn't appropriately communicate how i was supposed to beat either of them. I just looked up how to do it because the combat wasn't especially fun and I didn't want to do it anymore.
• It feels like the affection for this story comes from a time where people were so starved for something even remotely resembling something interesting in a video game story, praise is loaded on this game. Plus, the ending of Ben deciding for Mo that she's too good for him is some paternalistic bullshit that I don't like.
• This is still using a verb wheel. It's a much smaller one, but I still find it cumbersome. When trying to leave kickstand, you can only leave by grabbing the bartender, but only after you realize you don't have your keys. That's an unintuitive solution that is representative of bad adventure game puzzle design, I think.
• Things that shouldn't take a lot of time do, even though the game is short. Like when you're in the cave fish hideout, you get to the ramp. If you leave the room before pushing the ramp twice (which I did because it was unclear I needed to do it twice), you aren't allowed to go back into the ramp room. You have to leave the hideout, and come back, except oops to come back you have to do an entire circuit of the mine road to re-find the entrance. Don't make me re-solve problems/puzzles I've already solved.
• Speaking of the ramp puzzle, we ended up looking up the solution for it. I wouldn't have if it didn't make me rewatch the cutscene every time I failed, but I hate that shit.
• Speaking of rewatching things - the timed puzzles are awful. Retrying them becomes very quickly cumbersome and annoying. The takeoff/landing menus had plenty of options that would have made sense as solutions, and since there's a timer you can only try so many before it runs out. This is a puzzle you literally just brute force or look up the answer to. Which we did. We just looked up the answer after failing twice because I was tired of sitting through the explosion animation + the big ship's hatch opening.
• In fact, we just looked up all the solutions for the timed puzzles because it was too annoying to fail. We would fail each of them twice, and then just look up an answer because it was too punishing to experiment.

I'm sure there's other stuff if I think about it, but the small kernel of what might have been an interesting story was totally overshadowed by an overly cumbersome way of interacting with the world due to bad mechanic & constrictions placed on average puzzles. I didn't care if Mo & Ben were together at the end, and I didn't end up caring about Ben at all.

I give it 5/10 bumper car minigames

[Latrine]

I don't remember enough of the puzzle stuff but I agree with jenn on the story stuff and bikers just aren't my thing either. Although I'll say that from a historical perspective it's an interesting piece and my appreciation for the game has risen after hearing Jake talk about it and watching some of the documentary stuff from Double Fine. But out of Shafer's Lucasarts games I've always had fonder memories for Grim Fandango and Monkey Island 2. (Never played DotT). 

[mikemariano]

  On 4/24/2017 at 4:46 PM, jennegatron said:

Alright! Below contains story & puzzle spoilers, so if someone hasn't played it, don't open this up

 

 

Can't disagree with any of this even though I still enjoyed myself.  I basically couldn't solve a single puzzle unassisted during the last two-thirds of the game.  Even the final puzzle was too hard—and the solution is the box art!

[Trip Hazard]

I have a lot of affection for Full Throttle, and have finished it multiple times (I would never have managed it without following a guide), but Jennegatron is completely bang-on with her criticisms.

 

I like several of the solutions presented at the kickstand (locked door? Just kick it down!), but the solution is probably only intuitive if you're the leader of a biker gang

[Simon]

Yes, those criticisms all seem fair enough. The minigames were controversial at the time and can't have aged well.

 

As for the puzzling, I do admire how it limits itself to being very in-character in this game - almost everything you do makes sense as something Ben would intuit, either using his brute force or mechanical know-how - that doesn't necessarily mean it's always intuitive to the player, and conversely it can make for some dull/obvious solutions, but it's an interesting change from other adventure games. Often those have solutions that are fun stretches of logic, but beyond anything the character is likely to think of under their own agency. As far as I remember, Full Throttle has little or no object combination, just a couple of dialogue puzzles like at the Vultures hideout (Ben is pretty laconic), and very little back and forth between locations to progress (he's not that patient either).

 

Thimbleweed Park was sort of the opposite - you're constantly doing things that rely on information the characters couldn't possibly have, but that becomes part of the fun.

[syntheticgerbil]

I played this and man I really enjoyed the nostalgia trip. I still love this story and characters and I like how the puzzles are just all pretty much brute force. There's more than a few sloppy art errors though, which really sucks and I wish it wasn't so. Three of them fucking ruin puzzles, which probably explains why Mike did not finish the final scene without a hint. Hopefully those are patched because that kind of shit makes me not want to recommend the new version to anyone.

 

Also it seems like there was a really bad animator on the team because about a fourth of the character drawings tend to be straight trash, but luckily they aren't the most important cutscenes, which are superbly well drawn (or redrawn). This person must have drawn that new shockingly bad main menu. I also wish many of the backgrounds were better as sometimes they look like someone sloppily passed them through image trace in Illustrator and did a minor amount of redrawing. I guess they ran out of time. There's some cutscene backgrounds near the end that are just a bunch of messy desert color splotches.

 

Compared to the 2D art, I'm extremely surprised at how well they pulled off redoing all of the 3D vehicles and rerendering them to all fit the cutscenes just right. They looked bad in the trailers but now they look awesome and I'm super impressed. Also the 3D moving backgrounds, Christ it's great.

 

But I did feel like tonally the cutscenes felt weirdly abrupt, but it seems checking the Double Fine forums that someone boned up the music and between scenes it just cuts out when that shouldn't be the case. I knew something was off. I really hope they fix it, as it felt kind of cheap.

 

I haven't gone through more than the intro with commentary, but I hope it's as engaging as the Grim and DoTT stuff.

 

  On 4/24/2017 at 4:46 PM, jennegatron said:

Alright! Below contains story & puzzle spoilers, so if someone hasn't played it, don't open this up

I don't agree with much of this. But yeah, I've always hated the demolition derby minigame. I was kind of hoping they would revamp it so it wouldn't play like mush and that they would fix the silly visual distance issue for the puzzle in it. I think some of the issues in things like that were because DF felt the need to be able to switch back and forth to the original game on the fly, but I'm not sure that's really that necessary if it holds back control revisions.

 

Also I always liked the weapon juggling, but I agree the weapon you have to use on the Cavefish is clumsy and nonsensical. It was the one that stumped me on the whole game when I was young even though I always found the rest to be very easy on the adventure game scale (well until Telltale introduced pressing dialogue and you win). After you complete that section though, they do remove all Mine Road weapons from your inventory for the rest of the game.

 

Also you can skip all cutscenes and dialogue rather quickly! You can even skip through every section of the Mine Road and main highway to the next exit or skip fights you don't want to fight that particular person. You can also double click exits between locations to instantly warp to the next and not wait on walk animations. It should take only seconds to get back to where you need to be.

 

Also the part where you couldn't go back to the ramp is a new bug. It is curious you were able to get past that bug though. I ran into that one just messing around and I was never able to get back to the ramp without reloading a previous save even after driving back and forth (although I did skip it all). It seemed gamestopping. Someone else ran into this bug on the Double Fine forums so perhaps I should tell them to give a full run through of the Mine Road unskipped a try.

 

  On 4/25/2017 at 6:22 PM, Simon said:

As far as I remember, Full Throttle has little or no object combination, just a couple of dialogue puzzles like at the Vultures hideout (Ben is pretty laconic), and very little back and forth between locations to progress (he's not that patient either).

Yeah there isn't any inventory combination. I sort of always wanted to insert the hose in the gas can ahead of time but now that I say that out loud it sounds rather silly.