A long time ago, before today's fancy high resolution detailed 3D graphics, quality sound and havoc physics engine gaming on PCs used to be quite different. More flat, sprite-esq and easier on the hard drive when it came down to the size. And during those days, there was a genre called point and click games. These games didn't involve shooting thugs in the face or general construction of cities/armies/planet earth or even teaming up with your mates to smack something until it gave you exp. These games were interesting interactive stories.
Nowadays, They have been usurped by the more addictive, pretty and interactive (But still slightly shallow) Plat former RPGS. Just remember, as you bounce happily around with Mario on Mario Galaxies with your Wii your hands are stained with PnC games blood. Your dirty murderer :(.
A few famous titles come to mind, mainly Day of The Tentacle, Monkey Island, Broken Sword and the Discworld trilogy. Instead of shooting nasties in most of these games you had to outwit them, either with your main characters cheeky conversation skills or using random stuff your obsessively stolen all over the place to slat together a crude puzzle using lateral thinking.
Occasionally, mostly with the Broken Sword games you could mess up and have your main character cruelly killed. Many times in my experience poor George Stobbart of the Broken Sword series got shot, imprisoned or fell into a lethal trap because of my cheap assumptions and bad reaction times (Of course, I can reach the heavily armed man, shock him and in the next two second grab the lethal gun!. Ow.)
In these games days, they had the pinnacle of all gaming tech behind them (Very well drawn and rendered art, full voice acting with was a rarity back then where text usually took voices places and professional very well done stories) and were indeed quite a fun way to introduce a family friend into gaming. Funny how Tabloid Newspapers focused on the Dooms and Duke Nukem's of the day, but never cared for Sam and Max Hit the Road or Monkey Island eh?
The stories in these were made out of pure emotion. If you accidentally led your hero into a messy death, you felt horribly guilty. When Rincewind got really sarcastic (Eric Idle does lovely voice acting in games, I do hope we hear more from him) you can't help but snicker and the fictional character match maker inside you screamed at George and Nicole to get together!
This whole field was something that LucasArts was very very good out. Yes, LA did NOT make usually crappy Star Wars tie in games once upon a time many years ago. Back then, they made some golden Star Wars games too but we'll chat about that some other time. Even today, in the mighty year of 2007 Grim Fandango, Day of The Tentacle and the Monkey Island Trilogy cannot be beaten by the recent reappearance of PnC's bastard son.
Yeah, PnC returned majorly a few years ago with the release of Broken Sword 3 in full 3D. A few PnC games come out rarely now of this genre, but a majority of them are dog poo badly knocked up and released by a few amateur gaming companies with barely any experience, funds and a sane deadline. After all, why spend months even years making an action packed FPS with complicated animations, processor hogging explosions and complicated multi player modes when you can hire a few down on their luck porn actors, shove them in a voice studio and hire somebody who can knock togther polygons that resemble homosapien. And chuck in a few hundred bugs with a hack of a script writer fired from the latest series of The Simpsons.
My favourite games of the whole genre, however, have always been the Discworld ones. I've always been a fan of Terry Pratchetts Discworld for as long as I can remember and the Discworld games amused me greatly despite the fact when I got older and read the books discovered that Terry, quite cheekily, borrowed and merged several of his book plots for Discworld 1 (Guards! Guards! crossed with The Light Fantastic) and Discworld 2 (Reaper Man, Soul Music and Moving Pictures). The best one of these was Discworld Noir which took to the 3D plane beautifully and was actually a very well down story. I lost my PSX version of the game and ache to replay the thing sometimes. One of these days, I am going to look in the bargain bin for a PC replacement. Assuming it runs on Windows XP.
So PnC, we wish you well with our sepia tinged nostalgia. Just stop dropping horrible attempts to cash in on your past successes (The recent Sam and Max crap fests) and we wish you the best luck for a proper re-emergence into the gaming industry now that story is the most craved for elements in our digital Rambo/MMO/Dictator binges. Thankfully, a lot of these titles are either sold in Bargain Bin Remastered packs or available to play thanks to the SCUMM application with several others if you own the older DOSS era games. It is such a damn shame we never got a serious Star Wars version of these based on one of the more better expanded Universe Novels.
Oh, and in the words of beloved Guybrush, You apparently fight like a cow.
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