Dying Breaths: Point and Click Adventures

Question? Have you tried ‘Sam & Max‘ seasons one or two yet? Or the ‘Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People’ and ‘Wallace and Gromit’ franchise releases? Well, I’ve something I want to share with you.Considering those titles, the folk over at Telltale Games surely know the art of the point and click and have included hours of funny dialogue and brain twisters, but let’s put aside their well deserved glory for now and look back on their forefathers instead.

There are plenty of games in the old ‘point and click’ category deserving of the adoration of today’s gamers. Games like Monkey Island, Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, Loom and Maniac Mansion are all classic examples that you, the modern gamer, should have already sampled – and if you haven’t you should!

If you’ve never tried a point and click adventure game before then it can be described as a role playing game, except one with lots of dialogue and puzzles, which actually come to think of it IS a traditional RPG! Main characters are usually found throwing sarcastic comments at every object you look at, and they’ll make any random combination of items possible – like for example a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle, for that ultra-spy-action infiltration mission we all face once in a while.

For many years Lucasarts were on the throne when it came to these games. However, at some point it seems they just shut it down in order to milk Star Wars for all its worth and throw out a bunch of Jedi and X-Wing games. Later the only P&C games we would see were made by people who thought the genre was still too young to die in an industry seemingly obsessed with the repetitive nature of yearly franchise releases. One of these developers who keeps the love alive is Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw who makes a weekly gaming rant called Zero Punctuation, over at the Escapist. His games involve a cat burglar called Trilby, who get’s involved in a mystery case involving ancient artifacts, horrific murder scenes and lot’s of undead badguys. I highly suggest you check out what very well may be one of the last vestiges for this genre. Once it’s gone, it might not be back anytime soon, if ever!

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