Wii, A new home for point-and-click games?
Monkey Island, Broken Sword, Day of the Tentacle - all fantastic and still highly playable point-and-click adventure games.
Sadly we haven't seen too many new titles from the genre over the last decade, and those that we have are usually awful.
But things may be changing...
The Wiimote is the perfect point-and-click device for the interface and brains not brawn are what point and click adventures require, although at times you were at the mercy of the twisted mind of the game designer Zack and Wiki was a good example of how point-and-click games can work on the Wii. Although it needed a little more thought put into some of the Wiimote interactions (moving the remote in the way it asked wasn't always successful).
It's a shame that LucasArts don't seem to have plans for an updated Monkey Island or Indiana Jones, but TellTale Games have announced that Sam and Max, the venerable adventure brand recently revived via an episodic series of PC downloads, is coming to Wii, as the press release rightly says, "the game's easy-to-use interface is ideal for a broad consumer audience." If they get the interface right - item manipulation could be a pain with the Wiimote - then Wii could become the new home for adventure gamers.
Could we be seeing the rebirth of a much-loved genre?