Walkthroughs.

Today, we're used to games that throw massive resources away on scenery that we breeze through in mere seconds. Triple A games have budgets the size of hollywood blockbusters and it shows. If you spend enough money today, you can occupy someone with something new every minute for 40-80 hours.

In the 80's and early 90's, games had to deal with the constraints posed by comparatively tiny budgets (Full Throttle was an expensive game for the time, but cost less than a typical one hour TV episode) and limited hardware. Even if you spent what it took to deliver 80 hours of constantly changing material, you had to deliver it on cartridges, floppies or CD's.

The expectation back then was that, if you spent $50-60 on a game (not adjusting for inflation!), it should occupy 40-80 hours of your time. If you simply can't provide something new every few minutes for that period of time, then games needed to be difficult. They had to force players to bash their heads against the same content over and over again until they won. Action games required split-second timing and memorization of levels, while adventure games had to have convoluted and frequently unfair puzzles. By design, you were supposed to get stuck. Players had to be forced to kick every bucket, turn over every stone, and explore every last pixel of seemingly meaningless scenery. This is how you could turn two hours of content into an 80 hour game.

The author of this article compares Full Throttle to Day of the Tentacle to show why it's a bad game, but Day of the Tentacle is one of the very greatest adventure games ever written. It's like comparing a movie made today to Citizen Kane.

Full Throttle's puzzles were not out of step with other adventure games of the time. The reviewer is a bit unfair in how she lauds the "kick in the door" solution to the game's first barrier and then pan's the game for actually having some complex and, yes, unfair puzzles later on. She interprets that first solution as indicating this was a brute's game, and would be simpler than other adventure games, but the designers still had to make the game hard. Being able to bash through every obstacle would have made that impossible.

The action sequences were not sterling examples of game design, but they were better than people expected from an adventure game of it's era. Few games made until the mid 90's blurred the lines between action and adventure games for good reason. e.g. Game interfaces didn't have the built up conventions we have today. There wasn't nearly as much implicit knowledge you could expect of your audience. Action games of this era typically came with manuals that players were expected to read in order to figure out how to play the game. It was yet another extreme constraint to design action sequences that players could just jump into and figure out without any kind of coaching. When you got to the motorcycle fights or demolition derby, you were supposed to crash and burn until you figured it out. This seems horribly sadistic today, but it was a feature at the time. It added to the total amount of time you could spend on the game.

Today, games with great recorded soundtracks, voice acting, and quality animation are a dime a dozen, but Full Throttle had all these things when it blew people away just to have recorded voices or rock and roll in a video game rather than scrolling text and the comparatively rudimentary synthesized sound that was the rule for the time. Full Throttle made users feel like they were playing a TV show. This was something really new and it blew people away. The fact that Full Throttle told a good story too sealed the deal. It may not stand up to today's standards of gameplay, but it is fondly remembered by many for a reason.