Favourite Point and Click Adventure Games
Growing up with PC gaming in the nineties meant you would've played some great first person shooters, flight sims, real-time strategies and point and click adventures; some genre defining games, that are still best played on the format that spawned them.
The point and click adventure games were my favourite "relaxation" game, I saw them as interactive animated features with more depth and thought than merely a passive medium, you could redo funny lines or moments over and over again.
Some early games had the action buttons some later games had the contextual interactions, which in my opinion was the best way for the genre to evolve, other than fully voiced dialogue. Whether on DOS during the late 80s, early 90s; 256 colour and an image the size of a postage stamp 320x240 or when Windows 95 changed how games were played; 640x480 and 16bit colour, P'N'Cs always focused on narrative, character development and puzzles.
Most of my favourite P'N'Cs used humor, I don't think I would've cared about P'N'Cs if it wasn't for the humor. Sierra games weren't my cup of tea, I didn't particularly care for the Leisure Suite Larry games (yes I get it you got cock rot and die. HA-HA! hilarious!), Police Quest 2 had some great unintentional moments, such as the racist fail screen in about "Bum Suk Eqypt" - seriously?
P'N'Cs really changed when full motion video and the interactive CD-ROM came along, its appeal to the mainstream and casual gamers came in the form of less cartoony pixelated visuals and with more serious "adult" to "mature" stories and themes. As I see it, a good story is a good story, and many of the FMV P'N'Cs did not have good memorable stories. FMV games were targeting the "cultural elitists" or those who couldn't get past the cartoony animated pixels, being nothing more than juvenile (or young adult.) But FMV was nothing more than flat mediocre "3D" visuals, B-Movie anesthetics, over the top bad acting and ridiculous adult fantasies. Sure it allowed Douglas Adams to make Starship Titanic, but by the late 90s I had pretty much moved onto Diablo and Quake nonstop, and I didn't want to install 6 CDs and then still have to swap them out during play. Not to mention I didn't have the HDD space, often having to delete games after finishing one. I could run Diablo off the disc! Kind of a no brainer.
One of the low points in the genre despite the rise of FMV was when games became more 3D polygonal based with it came concepts of how to control. And tank controls was not fun at all to play. Some of the greatest P'N'C adventure game makers; Lucas Arts, Revolution went 3D and the games never played the same again.
Point and click adventures had never left in my view, with developers with like Wadjet Eye's Dave Gilbert, Pendulo Studios, Telltale's early efforts, Amanita Design, all keeping P'N'C adventures alive in their own way.
