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Full Throttle

The story by Tim Schafer goes like this. An oily executive (voiced by Mark Hamill, who does a number of the voices) plots to embroil Ben and his gang in a nefarious scheme involving the motorcycle company he works for and its cool-old-guy owner (who for some reason doesn't fire the guy in spite of hating him). You have to guide Ben as he goes out to save his gang, dodge police, fight other bikers, and kick down doors.

Almost immediately I was having trouble with the puzzles. It's not just that they're hard, but that they aren't as logical as they should be. The solutions for the puzzles often seem arbitrary; that is, I can think of other solutions that are just as good but that just don't happen to be the solutions required by the game. Some things, such as which weapon will knock out which biker in the action sequences, appear to be entirely arbitrary, and can only be solved through trial and error or rampant cheating. Not only is there a certain amount of pixel-hunting, but there are points where you really need to have just randomly clicked all over the screen to see what happens to discover something important. There were not too many puzzles where I cheated and thought, oh, I should have got that. What I thought was, geez that's annoying.

Some of the puzzles are pretty good, although even here there are cases when a clever puzzle is given an arbitrary twist.

While the gameplay leaves something to be desired, as a drama this is terrific. The plot is engaging, the dialogue witty, the cut scenes well animated, the rock score by The Gone Jackals is, well, rockin', and the characters well drawn, if not overly complex (as befits the biker-noir genre). The look of the game is a little drab, but you can't walk around the trailer with country music blaring from inside without having a strong sense of atmosphere. The game even has some cute credits (there are about 15 minutes of credits, I think, the cute ones are at the end), plus a bunch of haikus (My male fantasy/now a profit-making game/maybe I'll get chicks).

With a cheat in hand this is a very entertaining game. Without a cheat I would have given up very early on in disgust.

-- Charles Herold -1999