Blogs of the Round Table: Whenever I Smell Asphalt, I Think of Maureen

Ben's Opening Monologue, Full Throttle:

Whenever I smell asphalt, I think of Maureen.

That's the last sensation I had before I blacked out:

that thick smell of asphalt.

And the first thing I saw when I woke up was her face.

She said she'd fix my bike, free.

No strings attached.

I should have known then that things were never that simple.

Yeah. When I think of Maureen I think of two things:

asphalt and trouble.

Full Throttle is the first of Tim Schafer's relationship-centric LucasArts adventure games. I think Grim Fandango is superior, but Full Throttle is one of the shortest adventure games from LucasArts making it perfect for deconstruction. The entire game can be played easily in about six to eight hours and an experienced player or someone following a walkthrough without doing further exploration can do it in four hours.

I certainly recommend grabbing a copy from a friend or even a strange acquaintance. It plays perfectly well in ScummVM and on just about any platform you could want to run it on. Considering LucasArts' indifference to their own classic properties you probably shouldn't feel all that guilty if to borrow the game you engage the help of some devious Seeder utilizing Mr. Cohen's patented Torrent-brand Æthertube Data Cross-Packers. Come back when you've played it...

So let's deconstruct! Full Throttle is centered around the relationship between Ben and Maureen. It's right there front and center in ...

Enlark Mention

My partners at Pink Godzilla have mentioned my game in progress twice now in recent news on their homepage, including some edited words from yours truly.

Guess the official marketing hype has begun. The nervous anxiety increases.

Des Rêves Élastiques Avec Mille Insectes Nommés Georges

Deirdra Kiai just released her latest solo game project named Des Rêves Élastiques Avec Mille Insectes Nommés Georges or "elastic dreams with a thousand insects named george" or DREAMING. Dreaming flirts with existentialism and meta-commentary about the nature of games and the nature of writing for games. It's a fun, quick to play, useful to replay game as winding conversation through a dazzling diversity of scenery. It evokes the mood of something of a gaming equivalent of Richard Linklater's Waking Life.

One of the scenes in the game uses some of my "artwork". Curious to see where Deirdra would take it I passed along a collection of abstract art work that I created in High School during my "Abstarcia" period. Weirdly enough, according to google, I seem to be the only person to really use that term. Deirdra asked for us not to provide a background so that she could better play off of whatever her creativity came from seeing the background.

For the curious, "The Kingdom of Abstarcia" began as a series of abstract line drawings in Paint using nothing more than the default 16 color palette from Paint's Windows 95 era, made during free time in the school's computer lab. Each file was saved to floppy disk with an absurdly long name full of whimsical references to kings and temples and such. Somewhere around this time I started to come to the full realization that making a game required a lot of artwork and if I wanted to actually finish a game with only a few other contributors I would have to figure some way to use my own limited artistic talents. I combined the writing from the abstarcia images with idea of using the things that populated the doodles in my notebooks: various ...