Point. Click. Point. Click. I had so much to say on the narrative and context of Discworld the game that I didn’t get onto how it implemented the player’s interaction with it, which had a bit of a twist on the template. There were no blocks of verbs on screen to choose from like Day of the Tentacle; not even a different cursor to show which action you intended like Sam and Max. There was just a cursor, and left click moved, right click looked, and double click did anything else contextually appropriate. The only remnant of the old text adventures was that when you placed the cursor on an object its name would appear above it. This minimalism was part of a wider trend. Full Throttle, an adventure from genre frontrunners LucasArts and a debut in charge for Tim Schafer, takes its stripping back of the form even further. The result is both a triumph and a crisis.
Ben, its tough biker hero, walks around a world totally unencumbered by on-screen words. This gives some more impact to some excellent visuals – the moment when you first walk out of the confines of the bar it starts off outside and see him as a tiny figure against a vast rocky landscape is quite the vista. The textual aspect of the interface only comes in when you need to do something. Your cursor changes form when it’s over something you can interact with, and when you click the name of the object appears at the bottom of a circle surrounded by verbs represented in tattoo-style icons. A skull carries options to use his eyes or mouth, and below it are a fist and a boot. 50% of Ben’s possible actions carrying a suggestion of violence gets a message across fast, and it’s one the game runs with. The first puzzle solutions in the game being to kick the bar door in and grab the barman to threaten him is a fun kind of novelty set against the usually more mild-mannered LucasArts adventure hero.
As enjoyable as the action vibe is, there are functional issues with the approach taken. Pixel-hunting around the screen for the things you can interact with was an established bane for point’n’clicks, but normally at least when you found something you could see what it was. In Full Throttle you know when you’ve found something, but have to click and move your eyes to wherever the interface appears to work out what you have found, and if it’s the same thing you already found. This means that an object next to another one – say, a small slot in a big door, as you have to find at one point – is extremely easy to miss. This issue halfway replicates the worst puzzle by far in The Secret of Monkey Island, when after a whole game of objects each being differently named you were required to tickle a sleeping skeleton sailor’s feet by clicking on their feet, even though the text didn’t identify the feet separately.
Full Throttle’s interface is just one small part of its austerity. Compared to previous LucasArts adventures, and indeed Discworld, at any moment the number of things you can do is vastly smaller. Full Throttle just isn’t very interested in the typical point’n’click work of going around, taking in lots of small detail, making lots of little interactions, and making connections. Like its hero, it’s an action-oriented game of few words. By cutting back the number of possibilities you have to work with, it balances out some of the additional opacity of the (lack of) interface. Its story is a little silly, and it’s definitely not humourless, but it’s more focused on cinematic effect than any of its predecessors. It succeeds in telling a story very well, not least thanks to some excellent voice acting, including another Mark Hamill appearance. It suggests time and again that animation in the right hands was more effective tool than anyone had so far managed to make FMV recordings of actors.
For all that I like how it tells its story, though, there is something bizarrely self-negating about Full Throttle. Why would the proponents of an evidently successful genre be so keen on taking out so many of its distinctive features? The rise of FMV gaming that we’ve seen is a clue, though perhaps one of the most globally successful games I’m not covering is a bigger one. Myst did all of its exploration and puzzle solving without visible interface. Full Throttle was a bigger sales success than previous LucasArts point’n’clicks, the internet tells me (although I have a suspicion that may apply only in the US) but it didn’t save the genre from falling from the top. A group with honed storytelling skills can take an odd compromise and make it sing, but they can’t hide that its existence doesn’t really make sense.
Gallup compact disc chart, Computer Trade Weekly 29 May 1995 (chart for week to 20 May 1995)