“Whenever I smell asphalt, I think of Maureen.”

February 13, 2016 3:26 AM

RPS' Cara Ellison talks about Maureen, a character in Tim Schafer's adventure game Full Throttle.
posted by Sebmojo (12 comments total)

Sure, and when I hear Achtung Baby I intrinsically think of SSI's gold box set, particularly Curse of the Azure Bonds.
posted by Nanukthedog at 5:07 AM on February 13, 2016

Great article. I loved Full Throttle, but I was a teenager and never really thought about this stuff. I love Tim Schaeffer's games.
posted by uncleozzy at 5:32 AM on February 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

LucasArts was so great in the '90s.
posted by octothorpe at 6:10 AM on February 13, 2016 [4 favorites]

For those not familiar with Cara Ellison and/or Rock, Paper, Shotgun, this piece was part of a series of columns she did for them called S.EXE. There are links to the whole run (which was pretty uniformly great, though the interview with James Deen is a little unfortunate in light of later events) on the RPS web site here. (Warning: as you might expect from a column about games and sex, some of the links and images on that page are fairly NSFW.)
posted by firechicago at 6:31 AM on February 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

Cara Ellison (and Alice O'Connor) are two of the funniest and best writers about gaming today.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 8:54 AM on February 13, 2016

What's your favourite piece by Alice, GoA? She's been getting better but I've yet to be impressed by her stuff and I'd like to change that.
posted by Sebmojo at 11:44 AM on February 13, 2016

I really like the S.EXE series but mostly because good, insightful writing on videogames is so rare. A lot of the good stuff I find reaches a lot and can be really pretentious and most of RPS's features fall into a really good place.

Final Fantasy XV comes out this year (probably, maybe) and I don't want to link to it but every FF game has a character named Cid and there's little to no connection, just a different character named Cid each game. In FFVX Cid is now Cidney and she's a mechanic. Her design is......heinous. Like, such offputting fanservice that it's all my friend and I can talk about when we talk about XV. Her outfit is straight out of a cheap Halloween store. There were some think pieces about it and the developers responded to accusations that she was too "sexy" by saying that the developers put too much of themselves into her. here you can read it. (the fact that they describe her design as too sexy as opposed to too sexualized makes me see red). The point of my tangent is that I wish that they took a good look at Maureen and how she's dressed and represented and change EVERYTHING about Cidney.

Also, Full Throttle is getting an HD remaster, so if you haven't had the chance to play it it'll probably be coming out next year on PS4 and PC so you (and I) will finally get a chance.
posted by Neronomius at 12:11 PM on February 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

Tangentially related: does anybody know if there's a term for the type of art in Full Throttle, Sam & Max, and maybe Day of the Tentacle? I'm thinking about the thick, blocky outlines that aren't necessarily just 1-pixel wide, the type of motion, etc.
posted by beerbajay at 2:23 PM on February 13, 2016

Neronomius: "I really like the S.EXE series but mostly because good, insightful writing on videogames is so rare. A lot of the good stuff I find reaches a lot and can be really pretentious and most of RPS's features fall into a really good place.

Final Fantasy XV comes out this year (probably, maybe) and I don't want to link to it but every FF game has a character named Cid and there's little to no connection, just a different character named Cid each game. In FFVX Cid is now Cidney and she's a mechanic. Her design is......heinous. Like, such offputting fanservice that it's all my friend and I can talk about when we talk about XV. Her outfit is straight out of a cheap Halloween store. There were some think pieces about it and the developers responded to accusations that she was too "sexy" by saying that the developers put too much of themselves into her. here you can read it. (the fact that they describe her design as too sexy as opposed to too sexualized makes me see red). The point of my tangent is that I wish that they took a good look at Maureen and how she's dressed and represented and change EVERYTHING about Cidney.

Also, Full Throttle is getting an HD remaster, so if you haven't had the chance to play it it'll probably be coming out next year on PS4 and PC so you (and I) will finally get a chance."

As long as the 2x4 versus low to the ground biker combat sequence is improved, I will be happy.
posted by Samizdata at 12:03 PM on February 14, 2016

beerbajay: "Tangentially related: does anybody know if there's a term for the type of art in Full Throttle, Sam & Max, and maybe Day of the Tentacle? I'm thinking about the thick, blocky outlines that aren't necessarily just 1-pixel wide, the type of motion, etc."

Isn't that so called "pixel art"? It's sure what comes to mind when you mention pixel art to me.
posted by Samizdata at 12:08 PM on February 14, 2016

No, pixel art is much lower resolution, but makes a virtue of that constraint, think Terraria. FT has a vaguely cel-shaded look, maybe? Cf. the Borderlands games which are not dissimilar in their look.
posted by Sebmojo at 12:21 PM on February 14, 2016

"animators trying to do their thing through the filter of VGA resolutions" is what I'd call the look. If you look at traditional media by the same artists you find pretty much the exact same stylistic choices, except in real media instead of pixels. (Lucasarts games often involved a lot of real media work; the BGs in Monkey 2 were mostly scans of stuff drawn in art markers, for instance. And Schaefer's recent "Broken Age" kept the feel, with a ton of art done in modern art programs with lots of natural media simulation going on.)
posted by egypturnash at 10:05 PM on February 14, 2016