Point and click on the DS

After picking up what would be last months Nintendo Power I believe (yes I still subscribe); I came across an article about a game I hadn't heard of before that caught be attention: Time Hollow. Upon further reading of the subject of this game I found it's another point and click adventure game based on a mystery going on. Reminded me a lot of Hotel Dusk: Room 215, which I loved.

Your a seventeen year old boy who woke up one day to find yourself twelve years in the future (don't quote me on the exact year number there). You are given the Hollow Pen in order to draw circles which act as portals through time. From what I got, you need to go back in time to change the present so that you can find out what happened. Sounds pretty cool, I'll probably pick it up eventually.

Anyway, this got me to thinking about how many point and click adventure games are on the DS right now. A while ago you wouldn't think these to be any fun, from just the premise of the genre alone it doesn't stand well. A game where the point is to click on something to read some text just so you can go click on something else to read more text doesn't sound like something most people would be into. Yet they seem to hold well on the DS and the games may not seem to be the most popular, they do hold up well when it comes to the review scores they are given.

Myself personally wouldn't find playing one of these kinds of game on the computer if they had only come out for that platform, which is sad for I would have been missing out. Though this would probably be because I don't play games on my computer. My guess is that many people who did enjoy games like Hotel Dusk and Trace Memory, probably wouldn't have picked it up either if they had found it on the PC instead of DS.

Which makes me think why? The conclusion I come to is that maybe it's the portable element. If say hypothetically that Hotel Dusk was coming to both the PC and the DS and I was well informed about the game, which would I have chose? DS. Then again this may be because I don't computer game, so what would the gamer who does both pick? My answer would still be DS. I think this is because the idea of sitting down for a few hours to point and click my way through twenty hours of dialogue doesn't strike me as fun. Whereas on the DS I can read through all this while walking or taking a bus places. Then again I just sat around my house and played Hotel Dusk, so I guess I'm a rare section to that.

So maybe the point and click genre isn't doing so well because people don't want to devote their time to it. There are definitely not as many of this kind of game on the computer as there used to be, and if there's many, then it just goes to show because I don't know about them. But by being able to whip out the DS and go for twenty minutes instead of waiting for the computer to boot up, we find ourselves more into this. Which shows the DS may be restoring the old point and click genre, because they tend to have some great story. Though that's probably because story is mostly the whole game in point and click games.