Full Throttle Remastered

Full Throttle n'a jamais été mon Lucasarts préféré, et je crois me souvenir qu'il était le premier à retirer les fameux "verbes" au profit d'une roue limitée à 5 actions. Finalement le jeu restait tout de même très correct, et surtout doté d'une ambiance rock'n roll d'enfer. Mais malheureusement parsemés de scènes d'actions ratées, peu maniables et pénibles.

Comme tant d'autres, j'y ai joué à sa sortie. Mais je n'avais pas accroché à l'époque. J'ai racheté le jeu en promo en ayant pourtant l'original à la maison. Le travail de restauration est du même niveau que celui de Day of The Tentacle. C'est plus lisse et compatible avec les PC modernes. Le jeu lui même étant toujours identique, la critique est valable pour celui de 1995 et ce Remastered. Le scénario est sympatique et l'univers abordé est vraiment inédit dans le jeu d'aventure. En 1995 c'était carrément un grand coup de pieds dans le jeu d'aventure : des motards, des chaînes, des têtes patibulaires... C'est intégralement traduit en francais et c'est du très bon travail. Cette VF donne tord aux gens qui aujourd'hui voudraient que des VO car les traductions françaises sont soit disant toujours mauvaises... Sur un tel jeu c'est un réel plus et j'encourage GOG à proposer plus de versions francaises quand elles sont dispo sur le jeu de base! On est sur un jeu d'aventure taillé pour les années 90. L'animation est magnifique et le héro défoncer les portes est juste hilarant les première fois. L'aventure en elle même est malheureusement trop courte. On se retrouve devant un jeu ne possédant pas beaucoup d'énigmes. Les lieux visités sont peu nombreux et la dureée de vie en prend un coup. Les developpeurs ont ajoutés une partie arcade au jeu. Je pense pour rallonger la durée de vie. Un duel de motards dans lequel il n'y a finalement aucun intérêt. Pour battre les motards il faut simplement avoir récupéré dans un combat précédent l'arme adéquat pour battre le suivant. C'est tout. On est très loin de la qualité du duel d'insultes de Monkey Island qui servait réellement à faire avancer le scénario. Aujourd'hui que penser du jeu? Et bien la même chose qu'à l'époque. Beau mais court. Si vous êtes attiré par l'univers et que votre niveau de jeu d'aventure est plus proche du débutant, foncez, c'est une bonne pioche! Mais pas à 15€ dans tous les cas! En solde!

I felt like I overpaid 50%. While there's a lot to like about the game, the actual story is quite good, the world is cool, voice acting is good, music's great and the remaster is nicely handled as with the other Lucas Arts remasters... the actual gameplay was really not enjoyable and not just the much derided motorbike & demolition mini games (which frankly were the only bits that padded the game out to a swift 4/5 hours) which unfortunately sullied the whole experience for me. The "puzzles" are basically all trial and error which usually means repeatedly going though a clip of you running away, a short interlude movie or one of the many bike fights until you work out what works with what and even with its short run time it managed to squeeze in some poorly executed back tracking. For the ending I just gave in and used a walk-through as I'd simply stopped having fun and felt no joy or relief when I finally did come across the correct solution. It lives up to its dystopian setting with sparse areas with at most 3 puzzles to solve in each, a handful of items to look at and very few characters to interact with, I can think of only about 5 or 6 people who you can talk to within the game and much of that was just going through the options until they gave you what you wanted. The UI was okay, it did take me a while to realise that the 'look' option was combined with the talk/lick option but actually a separate action within the same button... having 4 buttons on a wheel would have made sense but then with such little talking to do perhaps it would have been superfluous. Also, while it has fast travel between areas, the purpose is rather defeated when you have to walk slowly back to your bike and sit through the animation of riding it out, cool the first 10 times, tedious by the halfway point. This is sadly one of the handful of point & clicks I don't see myself ever re-playing... but should a belated sequel ever arrive, I would certainly enjoy revisiting the world.

I had a good time with this game. The sense of humor and genre-tropes were pretty amusing, with a mix of Mad Max and zany / light-hearted humor. The puzzles mostly reasonable (only needed help with a couple at the end). A little pixel hunting with some of them stumped me for a time. You can highlight some clickables, but not all. Still, I'd say I needed *less* guide help than I do with most LucasArts point-n-click adventure games. Not the longest game in the world, if you're decent with puzzles, but good enough. The only solid drawback: a technical issue. Almost every single time I minimized the game, it froze and needed to be closed / reopened entirely. I know this was part-and-parcle for older games, but I'd figured we'd fixed that by now. Certain things, like alienware or nvidia, have overlay popups that automatically minimize the game -- thus, I had to figure out how to turn those off in my pc's settings to avoid automatically crashing the game. Even the transition from logo to start screen would crash, due to this.

I have a lot of nostalgia for Full Throttle, so being objective is a bit difficult, but in short: It is one of my favourite adventures, but it's not that great of a game. Full Throttle oozes charm and style like no other adventure game, but its gameplay is lacking. It is in general quite short, its puzzle can be questionable, it lacks interactable objects and it doesn't always feel like it respects its players time, both in smaller aspects and with bigger things like the bike combat sequence that will outstay its welcome for most, especially for new players. On a positive note: Full Throttle still does do a lot of very unique things for the genre and tells a unique story with unique characters quite well and for that it's definitely still worth playing. And the remaster? Honestly, I'm not convinced it's an upgrade. I don't like the slight changes in the art style compared to the original and the audio isn't as good as it should be, with harsh transitions between scenes and sometimes questionable audio mixing. So if you already have a old copy lying around, you might as well just throw that into ScummVM and save the money for the remaster. But please, play it anyway. It's fun.