Sometimes, I fall out of love with modern video games.
Like now.
When that happens I think back to a time when video games weren’t all about how realistic the facial animation was, how high a resolution you could run it and how many weapons your character could carry.
I dream of playing the classic point-and-click adventure games. Games like Full Throttle, Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle.
My teenage son doesn’t understand my love of old-school point-and-click adventure games. He doesn’t see the point of them. I don’t expect him to understand, though: He’s a gamer who has been brought up on a diet of Call of Duty, Halo and Clash of Clans.
Me? I’ve been gaming for a long time. A very long time. And I’m very old (OK, I’m not that old but I’m old enough to have played games on a ZX Spectrum computer. The one where the games came loaded on cassette tapes) but one thing has remained constant through my gaming years: My love of Lucasarts’ point-and-click adventure games.
I didn’t discover Lucasart’s point-and-click adventure games until my late teens, early 20s but I was hooked the moment I played one. I think it was Grim Fandango. Lucasart’s point-and-click adventures are a window to my gaming past.
Games like Full Throttle and Grim Fandango are my go-to games when I’m bored with modern games and their cookie-cutter story lines and formulaic game play that forces me to shoot countless enemies in a shadowy corridor/alien base/military facility before I can pick up an elusive key card and move to the next location.
Lucasarts’ The Dig. Sure it’s primitive compared to today’s graphical standards, but it’s got gameplay by the bucketloads.
I played about two hours of Metal Gear Solid V and got bored with it (really, I did). I’m bored with the Call of Duties and Battlefields. I started playing Fallout 4 two weeks ago but I’ve only played about 15 hours because I picked up a cheap copy of The Dig the other day on the latest Steam sale (Steam is Half Life 2 maker Valve’s digital delivery service that is hazardous to my credit card) and have been playing that instead.
Every time I hover my mouse icon over the Fallout 4 shortcut on my PC’s desktop, I hesitate – and click on The Dig instead.
Some of the most celebrated point-and-click adventure games of all time came from Lucasarts. Titles like Full Throttle, Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle, The Curse of Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, Loom and The Dig.
Oh, hey, look, it’s disc copies of Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. I’m holding them.
I still own disc copies of Grim Fandango and Full Throttle, games that are hard to find on disc. And thanks Steam I now have versions of Loom, The Dig, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade that I can play on my modern PC. I bought the remastered version of Grim Fandango when that came out, too.
The point-and-click games I’ve mentioned involved big names. Names like Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer and Gary Winnick, writers like Orson Scott Card, and in the case of The Dig, Steven Spielberg.
They had atmospheric soundtracks and, most of them, were renowned for their puzzles, which ranged from relatively straightforward to frustratingly hard (The Dig was a prime candidate here and I’ve been forced to use a walkthrough for some of the more obscure puzzles). Yes, the puzzles are often the kind that made you pull your hair out but I stuck with them (mostly), satisfied when the solution suddenly appeared.
Games like The Dig, Monkey Island and Grim Fandango are where you searched every corner for clues and picked up every item, no matter how inconsequential it seemed at the time. The game play mechanics were of the use this item on that item and see what happens. If it wasn’t going to work the game told you so.
Sadly, games like Grim Fandango and The Dig were made at a time when PCs were, let’s say, lacking the modern computation grunt and powerful graphics cards that we’re used to today so disc based copies of the games don’t tend to play nicely with modern hardware. Believe, me I’ve tried. I even remember having to search the internet for a tweak to slow down a puzzle in Grim Fandango because a modern CPUs sped it up!
I love Lucasart’s point-and-click adventure games so much that that’s probably why I backed Tim Schafer’s Kickstarter for the game that would eventually become Broken Age. Sadly, it took so long for the game to be completed that I lost interest after the first part was released and still haven’t completed it. Shame, really.
That experience didn’t stop me backing Gilbert and Winnick’s point-and-click adventure Thimbleweed Park, though, which is due out sometime next year and harks back to those point-and-click games. From what I’ve seen, Gilbert and Winnick haven’t become bogged down by some of the stuff that Schafer had with Broken Age.
Look, old school games are like a pair of well-worn slippers when modern games get too ridiculous: They’re familiar and comfortable, and I can’t ever see myself growing out of them.
[Update No. 1: This week, Tim Schafer announced Double Fine, his game development studio, was going to make Psychonauts 2, a sequel to a rather great game. He’s asking for crowd funding to help make it. I couldn’t resist: I funded it. I just couldn’t help myself.
[Update No.2 Double Fine has announced at PSX that its remastering Full Throttle. That’s an instabuy for me, provided the developer remasters some of the more frustrating sequences, like a race through a canyon on a motorcycle. That frustrated the hell out of me]
