Our friend Cheese was hard at work on the Linux port of Full Throttle Remastered based on the classic adventure from former Lucas Arts (now Double Fine). Cheese is no stranger to Double Fine ports, since he dealt with Day of the Tentacle back when it got its Remastered version as well. When we interviewed him for our podcast, while he had found the porting process interesting he did not seem like he wanted to continue in the business of porting… but guess what? His contacts at Double Fine were probably happy to reach him again for this port.

At the time of writing the game is only available on Steam (GOG only has Windows and Mac) and you can grab it for less than 10 USD right now (33% off). Just like the Remastered version of DOTT, this new version brings a lot of improvement:

• No more blocky graphics: all the visuals were given a nice, smooth upgrade.
• Voice-overs are now rendered in high quality.
• The game takes advantage of wide-screen now.

You can see some of these improvements in action in the below trailer.

And as usual you can always switch between the good old version and the newer one. I remember this game very well when it came out. It was extremely impressive to have a game that looked very much like a cartoon, with so many sequences in full motion video. Now the tech is not impressive anymore, and what remains is a very entertaining biker-themed adventure game. It’s not without flaws though. I remember a number of puzzles were really hard to guess, and there’s also these really awkward action scenes at some points which don’t really fit well (they… sucked). Not sure if the remastered version improved on such scenes or not. Nevertheless, it’s definitely one of major titles from Lucas Arts, while it’s not as famous as DOTT.

Good to have an actual release on Linux again - while you could always play the older versions thanks to the fantastic SCUMMVM project.