The Point and Click Genre

I suppose this is my ode to point and click games. You see, when I was a child, my sister and I lived a good 30 minute walk from our nearest friend, and due to there being no pavements on the road in the summer we were stuck at our house. In a sense, I suppose this is why I had quite a lot of social issues, as I never really bonded with people and found it hard in later life to make friends. But point and click was always my love as a child; while people were talking about completing Sonic and Mario, I was far too busy completing Monkey Island and Sam and Max.

Of course the games were never aimed at children like me, and so the humour was lost, but the games made me think and I loved them for that. For years on our six weeks holiday, we would run these games back to back, every game losing us in a world away from the boring and mundane Summer holidays alone with just me, my sister and crap TV.

The games list was endless. Every point and click going was bought with pocket money and for birthdays, from the LucasArts classics like Sam and Max, Monkey Island and Full Throttle, to the joys of Simon the Sorcerer. Even down to the difficulties of Sierra games like Police Quest and Space Quest where everything was as frustrating and as rewarding as the last. Also, does anyone remember the Little Big Red Adventure? Answers on a postcard if you do. All this was made possible by one of my dad's friend owning a small game store. We would always pop in and get the latest releases and I'm pretty sure we kept him in business. I remember my dad buying me Full Throttle days before my birthday, and I remember 'borrowing' the disc and completing the game in hours after installing. My dad was mad as I had taken the present, but I think he was also pleasantly surprised that I had done the game in such a record time

However, by the time I was a little more older, the games lost their appeal. I remember playing Grim Fandango and not loving the 3D world. I wanted the 2D sprites that captured my interest and made me see the detail in the game. Point and click, for me, had been lost forever.

I feel the loss was also down to great games like Sam and Max never getting the sequel they deserved, and games like Simon the Sorcerer ending up going 3D and losing the plot completely.

After this time, my sister was old enough to disappear to her friends' houses and I was old enough to look after myself without setting the house on fire. The summers were filled with first person shooters and RTS games, and soon gaming took a different approach as my dad showed me the online world, and took me from single player games in my bedroom to a whole host of multiplayer games online.

Online play even got me into GameOn, and being an active community member long enough to become one of the writing staff. But that's a different story.

Even now while playing online I miss those times with the point and click games with me and my sister running through them countless times but still enjoying the humour and story. It didn't matter to us that we had played it a thousand times, we wanted to play it a thousand times more.

However soon developers like TellTale came along from canned LucasArts point and click games. They came and made Sam and Max great again, and with the recent Monkey Island games, and even Back to the Future games, they have shown that point and click isn't dead; however I still don't feel that magic that there was in years gone by.

Every now and again I dig out my old box copies of these games and re-run them with ScummVM and now laughing at the jokes that I missed and loving the sprite graphics that fill my screen.

So thanks to the LucasArts team that made this possible and all the other developers like Adventure Soft and Sierra, you were what made my summers great, and you gave me a passion for gaming and for that I can't thank you enough.