Full Throttle - LucasArts
                   PC CD-ROM   -  œ39.99

                  Reviewed by Neil Shipman

For 18 months Full Throttle has been sitting on the shelf along
with a number of other adventures. I bought it soon after it was
released, hoping that my 486SX33 would be up to the job of running
it even though the minimum spec requirements on the bottom of the
box said you needed a 486DX33. Hey, so what's a little maths
co-processor between an adventure fan and one of his favourite
software companies? Well, I'll tell you. The lack of this little
chip meant that my poor old computer just couldn't handle the
(then) state-of-the-art graphics, music and sound effects without
going on strike. While I was waiting for it to load a new screen
or to move on to the next few bars of the soundtrack I had time to
order a Chinese takeaway, go and pick it up, come back AND watch
an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation! Only joking, but
that's what it felt like; so the game was quickly consigned to the

shelf until such time as I acquired a Pentium (this year, next
year, sometime, never?)

[By the way, isn't it terrible that we've seen the last episode of
Star Trek: TNG?  Still, Star Trek: Voyager is beginning on
terrestrial TV in the autumn, so at least that's something to look
forward to.]

Anyway, I still haven't got a Pentium but I have upgraded my
sturdy workhorse to a 486DX2/66 which is what most of you have
probably had for a year or two already! (I've also fitted a
fax/modem card and am now on the Internet so, for anyone
interested, my e-mail address is neil@friary.u-net.com) Well,
having dabbled with a couple of good text adventures and polished
off Coktel Vision's Lost In Time and Legend Entertainment's
Superhero League Of Hoboken over the last few months, I dusted off
the LucasArts box and installed Full Throttle again. Now,
thankfully, it ran at a rather more acceptable speed.


So, what's it all about then? "Motorcycles, Mayhem and Murder!" it
says on the packaging and that's just about as succinct as you can
get. It's a sort of biker action movie for adventure gamers
presented in a light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek way. You play the
part of the lantern-jawed hero Ben, the leader of a motorcycle
gang called the Polecats. (As is the case with many traditional
heroes Ben doesn't have a surname, he's just Ben!) Down on your
luck and right out of cash, you and your gang are hanging around
the Kickstand Bar when in comes an old guy in a suit, Malcolm
Corley, head of Corley Motors, the last motorcycle manufacturer in
the country. Over a drink in the bar, Malcolm gets on well with
Ben, swapping stories and re-living his old biking days. Then in
comes Corley Motors' slimy CEO, Adrian Ripburger, to pursue his
idea of riding up to the forthcoming shareholders' meeting with a
biker escort - good PR, of course.

Any biker worth his boots would never agree to rent out his gang
as an escort to a suit and, having failed to persuade him that his
boss doesn't want just any old biker gang - he wants the Polecats
or nothing - Ripburger 'persuades' Ben with a piece of two by four
and leaves him unconscious in a dumpster. He tells the rest of the
gang that Ben has agreed to the deal and has gone on ahead, so the
Polecats roar off alongside Corley's limo.

First you've got to get out of the dumpster, find your keys and
get after them. And when the bartender tells you that there's been
talk of an ambush up ahead, plus the fact that someone was talking
of killing you and making it look like an accident, you know
you're in big trouble. Ben may think he's indestructible on the
road but that 'accident' is just about to happen. Fortunately a
friendly reporter who's just passing helps him and his mangled
machine to a repair shop owned by Maureen. Yeah, you knew there
had to be some love interest in the story didn't you? - and this
is it! The dialogue between Ben and Mo is pretty terse and
superficial but it's handled in a way which conveys the feeling of
their relationship starting to grow. Mo needs a new set of front
forks, a welding torch and a can of gas to get your bike fixed up
and on the road again and this is where you really start
adventuring.

There are three locations to visit in the area: Todd's trailer,
the gas tower which is patrolled by airborne cops and a junkyard
guarded by a ferocious dog. With a very limited number of objects,
plus some astute use of fists and feet, you should soon get
together everything you need and be on your way up the road after
Corley, Ripburger and your gang.

The interface is intuitive and unobtrusive. All you see on screen
in the interactive sections of the adventure are white
cross-hairs. When they pass over an interesting object a red box
forms around them. Then, if you hold down the left mouse button up
pops a tattoo of a skull with eye sockets and grinning teeth plus
a hand on one side and a boot on the other. The object's name
appears at the bottom of this icon.  Moving the cursor over the
eye sockets makes a pair of eyeballs appear and if you then
release the button Ben will tell you what he sees. Similarly you
can eat, drink or speak by using the teeth (which open to display
a blood red tongue); you can manipulate things or punch them with
the hand; and you can kick ass, doors or whatever with the boot.

Clicking the right mouse button brings up your inventory from
which you can select objects to use directly on items in the main
screen. The object you choose is highlighted and becomes the
cursor itself. There is some scrolling between screens but
generally you move from one to another by clicking on a large red
arrow when on foot or a yellow arrow road sign if you are riding
your bike.

When talking to other characters you are presented with three or
four different lines of dialogue from which to choose. Often it's
advantageous to try out all the options but there are some
instances where you must say the right thing to make any progress.
If you want to see all the speech as well as hear it, simply press
F1. This function key also gives you access to up to 99 saved game
positions.

Now, Mo has a surprise for you. Not only has she fixed up your
bike, she's also fitted it with your average, everyday, pre-
regulation, destroyer-class, solid-fuel, recoil booster! With some
serious machinery to hammer down the desert roads on you quickly
make it to the place where Malcolm Corley has stopped to take a
leak. Now things get nasty as Ripburger's impatience gets the
better of him and, instead of waiting for the old man to die of
natural causes, he helps him on his way.

You come across Corley just as he's breathing his last and you
learn about Ripburger's plan to start making mini vans instead of
motorcycles (shock! horror!). With his dying breath, Corley
implores you to find his daughter, get her to take over the
company and sack Ripburger before he can put his plans into
operation at the shareholders' meeting. "You gotta hurt him for
me, Ben. Promise me you'll hurt him bad!" says Corley, and from
that moment on you are cast in the role of leather-jacketed
avenger with your new-found girlfriend by your side.  Your
resolution is made all the greater when you hear that your
Polecats have been thrown in jail as murder suspects.

In the process of fulfilling your promise to the now dead Malcolm
Corley you have to persuade a trucker to give you a lift through a
police roadblock, fight other bikers on the mine road, find the
entrance to the Cavefish gang's hideout, leap across Poyahoya
gorge, take part in a demolition derby, get into the Corley Motors
factory, find Malcolm's will and demonstrate to the assembled
shareholders just what an odious, conniving, double-dealing,
murderer Adrian Ripburger is.

In the fight sequences on the mine road you control your bike by
moving the mouse left or right. An icon in the bottom left corner
of the screen shows you what weapon you're currently holding.
Clicking on the right mouse button cycles through your available
weaponry while the left button enables you to use the chosen one.
Different gang members require hitting with different weapons to
send them face down into the asphalt and you pick up whatever they
were wielding to add to your arsenal. If you come off second best
in any of these fights you're treated to a scene of Ben hitting
the dirt, but then your position is automatically restored and
you're back on your bike again. Similarly, in the end-game
sequence, if you make a wrong decision or don't make the right
move fast enough you end up dead but only for an instant. Ben

says, "Ouch. Let's try that again!" and you're automatically taken
back to the beginning of the scene.

The demolition derby is the other arcade-type part of the
adventure where you use a combination of mouse and keyboard
controls to steer your car into a head-on collision with one of
the others.

Neither the fights or the demolition derby are at all difficult
and even your reactions are as slow as those of a sloth on Mogadon
you should have no trouble with either sequence.

The characters are all portrayed in clear, uncluttered, cartoon-
style graphics with little detail and this has the effect of
making them seem larger than life. These are set off against
backgrounds which are outstanding, especially a number of views of
the evening skies with their dark pinks, mauves and blues giving
way to blue-black, star-studded heavens. In the cut scenes,
movie-type techniques are employed throughout with procedures like
tracking shots and close-ups. The main gripe about these scenes,
though, is that there are far too many of them and they go on too
long. Consequently, you sit there itching to get into the action
but find that you have to wait another few minutes before you can
put finger to mouse button. As usual, you can bypass these scenes
with the Esc key - but you still need to see them once to know
what's going on.

The characterisations are a triumph of casting and the voice
acting is superb. Roy Conrad, who plays Ben, delivers his speech
in a wonderfully deep bass voice which makes the character
slightly over the top but still believable as your hard-bitten,
butt-kickin', biker gang leader, action hero. Mark Hamill guest
stars as the voice of Adrian Ripburger and portrays this character
with suitably slimy, creepy, tones.

The "Motorcycles, Mayhem and Murder!" theme of the adventure is
lightened by the thread of humour which runs throughout. There are
numerous occasions when you just have to laugh out loud. I
especially liked the trucker in the bar who kills time by
spreading his fingers out on the table, stabbing his way between
them with his pocket knife! (Hands up - regardless of the number
of fingers - all those who've played that game in the past,
showing off to your mates!).  Then there are the exploding bunnies
which you use to clear a path across a minefield to the Vultures'
hideout. These jump around - albeit unbearably slowly - to the
accompaniment of a percussion rendition of "The Ride of the
Valkyries" which is weird to say the least!

The sound effects are excellent.  The noise that Corley's
turbo-driven limo makes as it arrives at the Kickstand Bar is
comparable to the deep, gut-churning rumble of the alien
spacecraft in Independence Day. [Incidentally, this updating of
War of the Worlds definitely gets my vote for the best movie of
the year. You absolutely must see it!] Rolling thunder, revving
engines, crashing gears and swishing chopper blades are all
produced in cinematic quality sound. Background noises like the
ever-prevalent night sounds of dogs howling and crickets
chirruping, all add to the realism.


But the one thing that helps raise Full Throttle above the norm
and makes it stand out as a game worthy of your cash is the heavy
metal soundtrack from an 'authentic hard-hammerin' biker band' (it
says on the box), The Gone Jackals. They play tracks with titles
like Drop The Hammer, Born Bad, Let 'Er Rip and Love Comes
Crawling, to name just a few. If you play it through your hi-fi
system instead of the PC's speakers, with the volume turned right
up, you can't fail to get into the mood of the adventure. And, if
you really like the sound, you can even get an unedited version of
the Full Throttle music on The Gone Jackals' audio CD 'Bone to
Pick'.

The ending is wonderfully over-the-top as the Vulture's C130 cargo
plane rolls down the desert road, snaps up the truck with
Ripburger, you and Mo on board and ends up (if you act quickly
enough) hanging precariously over the lip of a deep canyon. It's
the sort of thing that could be taken straight from many of the
action movies of recent years with someone like Bruce Willis or
Arnie in the starring role.

And when it's all over you must watch the credits. Game producers
nearly always seem to take liberties with these nowadays and in
Full Throttle they last a cool 27 minutes!  There are credits for
people who 'supported the general coolness of the project',
carried out 'Haitian political analysis', 'kept track of my piles
of money' and even a credit for those people who 'whined about not
being in the credits'!

At the end there's a special Biker Haiku Section, penned by
members of the production team, with gems like:
     splitting lanes at rush
     beaver tries for a cutoff
     taste my righteous chain
or   sky covers the land
     dark goggles cover my eyes
     speed covers my tracks
and perhaps the most apposite:
     my male fantasy
     now a profit-making game
     maybe I'll get chicks

The over 15 age restriction on the box is ludicrous because
although there's a bit of fighting there's no offensive language -
certainly nothing that a kid half that age wouldn't hear in the
playground or see on TV. Still, it probably helped the marketing
folks at LucasArts shift a few hundred thousand more copies than
they would have done if they'd said it's OK for anyone over, say,
8 years old! Certainly a friend's young lad who is just that age
is currently playing it and enjoying it immensely.

The CD-ROM contains playable demos of 'Dark Forces' and 'Rebel
Assault' as well as a very necessary boot disk maker program which
you will almost certainly need.

Full Throttle is an innovative production by LucasArts but it does
have its negative points which significantly reduce the player's
enjoyment of the game. Firstly, there are too many cut scenes and
they are, without exception, far too long. This makes it not so
much an interactive adventure game as a cartoon movie in which you
occasionally have something to do. Secondly, the puzzles are few
and far between and are much too simple for anyone other than the
novice adventurer.  Finally, if you're thinking of playing it on a
PC which only just reaches the recommended minimum spec, you'll
have to be prepared for some long waits and occasionally choppy
sound and graphics. If you can pick it up for under œ15 it's worth
taking a look at but the small amount of gameplay doesn't really
warrant the RRP of œ39.95.

Minimum System Requirements are:

486DX33MHz processor or higher
8MB RAM
MS-DOS 5.0 or higher
Super VGA Graphics Card (640 x 480, 256 colours)
Double speed CD-ROM drive
MPC level 2 compliant sound card
Hard Disk with 1MB of free space


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