Kotaku: full throttle

On Full Throttle 2, And What Could Have Been

Luke Plunkett — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 02:30:00 MDT

Roll up your sleeves, Lucasarts fans. Classic Adventure Gaming have one hell of an interview up with Bill Tiller, a former artist at Lucasarts who worked with the company between 1993 and 2001. Specifically, it's about Tiller's involvement on the little-known Full Throttle: Payback, the cancelled sequel to Tim Schafer's badass 1995 adventure game. Basically, if you've ever wanted to hear somebody personally relate the period when Lucasarts decided to eat their own adventure gaming babies, you'll want to read this. It's got plot outlines for the game, the reason it would have been better than the other Full Throttle sequel, Hell on Wheels, as well as a ton of concept art. All of it good reading.

The rise and fall of Full Throttle: a conversation with Bill Tiller [Adventure Classic Gaming, via Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

ScummVM, Now For Your Nintendo Wii

Luke Plunkett — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 03:30:00 MDT

If you're not interested in getting homebrew up and running on your Wii, fine. That's your business. You're probably not interested in knowing that ScummVM is now working for the system, either, nor in seeing a man play Full Throttle on his couch using a Wii Remote. Because that's not awesome at all, is it?
[via Savygamer]

Tim Schafer Shows Us How to Do That

egauger — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 18:20:46 MDT

Tim Schafer seems smart. Like, really smart. I am extremely impressed with the very simple, very true little bombs he drops over and over in this recorded lecture from GDC 2004.

Yeah, it's long. But for anyone interested in creating any sort of fictional experience, be it games, movies, books or Crecente/Bashcraft slashfic (we call it Bashfic), this will be a valuable hour and five minutes for you.

A very few of the many points Schafer makes about creating good characters:

Characters should be wish fulfillment. This doesn't mean they can't be goofy, or nerdy, or losers. There are lots of ways to make characters that are fun to play. Guybrush might not be a badass, but he always has a comeback.
Create supporting NPCs as you would the ideal road trip buddies. Making them annoying, offputting, needlessly stupid or generally hateful and then sticking the player with them through the whole game is just sadistic.
Write the PC as you would a character in a movie, a character that a good actor would jump at playing.

More after the jumpasaur.

Backstory. Making up pasts for every single one of your characters, big ones or not, makes it insanely easy to imbue them with neat little traits by pulling from the past you've created.
Steal stuff, but steal it right. Steal stuff from life, especially. From your own life, from your friends', from crazy things hobos tell you on the street. And steal stuff from other fiction, but don't steal the surface junk. Steal what makes good things good. So if you're stealing from GTA, stealing the hookers and mobsters and violence is missing the point. Steal the fun, the open-ended gameplay, the facetious attitudes.

I'm taking better notes on this speech than I ever did on anything in the history of my school career, so I'll stop. Just give it a listen; even if you aren't a creator this will give you a whole new way to look at and appreciate games. Eliza Gauger

Listen to the lecture here, and subscribe to the Gamasutra podcast [Gamasutra]