Best Games - Full Throttle
The early to mid 90s, point and click adventure games were the hot genre. I mean, sure, there were lots of other types of games out there. Sports games were just ramping up and up. But point and click adventure games were really pushing the whole medium forward. If there was a new technology, point and click adventures had the budget to take advantage of it. CD-ROM, point and click adventure games. Broad color palettes, point and click adventure games. Full motion video, voice acting, character animation, dynamic soundtracks, digital recording. All point and click adventure games.
Let’s not forget, putting story in games. That’s all on adventure games… well, text adventure games first, of course, but point and click adventures picked up that flag and ran with it well into the early 2000s.
One thing that adventure games of that era didn’t usually do, was innovate on gameplay. For an awfully long time those types of games were called graphical adventure games, because they were text adventure games with a slight drizzle of graphics on the top half of the screen. They had a text parser and everything. You had to type in directions for the your character to walk north or west or climb up the stairs. I honestly think that is one of the reasons why almost everyone under 50 can type now. They had to learn so that they could play Kings Quest.
Eventually, the mouse became the de facto method of interacting with images on a screen, and you could just click on the verbs and nouns rather than keying them in. More of a lateral move than any real innovation.
In the very early 90s, a few games in the, now, point and click adventure genre, removed the words entirely and switched to an entirely icon based interface. There were icons for all of the major interactions that a player could attempt. Walk to a place, look at a thing, interact with or pick up that thing, talk to a person, etc.
While that did make the games more inviting, and quicker to navigate for experienced players, they also created a bit of thematic distance for the player. Sure, you can click on a thing, but will the hand icon pick up that thing, move that thing, or do some other action that you weren’t intending. Also, are computer icons, laid out in a line on the top or bottom of the screen, really appropriate for a swords and sorcery medieval world? All those icons meant that you were playing a game, and if you were looking to be immersed in a world, well here is your constant reminder that you are looking through a glass window on your computer screen.
I don’t know if Full Throttle was the first game to create a fully themed, pop up, interface. One with the absolute minimum of options needed to interact with the world. It might not have been the first, but it was easily the most successful.
In Full Throttle you control biker gang leader, Ben. Ben can talk to people and look at things, but otherwise he can really only grab, punch, or kick. That’s who he is. That’s how he deals with the world. He punches and kicks it.
When you aren’t punching or kicking, the interface just goes away, and suddenly you are watching a fairly funny animated movie.
The entire world of Full Throttle is sort of a “what if Mad Max, but kind of nice, and only a little devastated”. And the way you interact with the game reflects that. You punch and kicks things, but in a comic violence sort of way. Ben is sort of loveable, when you get to know him. Most of his rage is directed at kicking in doors.
Every point and click adventure game after Full Throttle adopted some form of context sensitive interface. A floating radial menu, or a system that tries to be clever and infers what the player might want in any given situation. It’s a system that can still be found in point and click adventure games 20 years later.
Maybe it’s time for a new innovation, or maybe it still works. Either way, Full Throttle is still a great game. I would even say, it’s one of the Best Games.