![]() ![]() So in an attempt to rekindle my love for the glorious charm of the point-and-click adventure, I snatched them all from the site and delved right in. Whether you’re a fan of the genre or someone just curious as to what’s this all about, there’s free gold to be claimed.īefore we get started, you should know that I’m still making my way through some of these. ![]() Running a few searches and doing a bit of cross-referencing, I found five free old point-and-click games to download for no charge whatsoever via GOG, none of which I’d ever played before. There are loads more available on the popular Steam, but if you don’t use GOG already I highly recommend it. Where you can find some great point-and-click titles though is GOG.com, a distribution service and publisher for PC Games that boasts tons of retro titles and a downloadable interface to play them all on. Many are tough to track down now, and even if you do manage to find copies, they’re not always compatible with modern computers (your laptop probably doesn’t have a CD-ROM drive, like). ![]() LucasArts was the studio behind one of my favourite PC games ever, the Mark Hamill-starring Full Throttle (1995) and even released two Indiana Jones point-and-click titles, while the Christopher Lloyd-starring Toonstruck (1996), released by Burst Studios, and Sierra’s Police Quest: Open Season (1993) were other genre highpoints.īut we’re not here to talk about those classics. ![]() For reasons I don’t entirely understand, George Lucas’s LucasArts went hard on point-and-clickers, releasing classics like the genre-creating Maniac Mansion(1987) and it’s sequel Day of the Tentacle (1993). Sometimes you’d be left conversing with the supporting cast, working your way through all the multiple-choice dialogue until you finally asked the right question.īut what the best titles in genre did boast was deep characters, gorgeous artwork, funny gags and great storytelling. Get stuck, and gameplay would usually devolve into you trying to randomly interact with people or objects until something worked. The player would generally be given a task – finding objects, for example –which would need to be completed to push the story forward. Point-and-click games were actually deceptively simple, built on a pretty straightforward puzzle-solving formula. While CD-ROMs often boasted pristine music and professionally-recorded movie clips, PC just wasn’t as powerful a gaming platform as the Super Nintendo or Sega Megadrive. Plus, most point-and-click games were designed for hefty CD-ROMs that could hold tons of great audio and video, giving them better surface-level production values than cartridge-held games. They were big hits on DOS back in the day, and the huge amount of absolute must-plays in the genre helped make desktop machines essential gaming platforms as these were experiences not easily replicated on the era’s consoles. Point-and-click titles, you see, worked best with a PC or Amiga’s mouse. Gamers would move their character around the screen by clicking where they wanted to walk to, using their cursor to interact with objects on the screen (left click to ‘walk’, right click to ‘pick up’, ‘use’ or ‘talk to’ was a common formula). If you were a prolific PC gamer in the mid-’90s, your collection was no doubt packed full of point-and-click titles. Scrolling Pixels is Dean Van Nguyen’s monthly retro gaming column. ![]()
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