Got a few thousand Wii Points to spend? It’s worth investing them in the enchantingly odd (and odd-titled) Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People. The first two episodes of the game series that defines acronymic awkwardness are now available on WiiWare, and provide welcome resuscitation for the sporadically dead genre of yore: the Point and Click Adventure.

Based on the long running online animated cartoon Homestar Runner, S.B’s.C.G.F.A.P focuses on the Macho Libre figure of Strong Bad and his frequent attempts to make Homestar’s life a misery. The first episode sees him, among other things, ruining Homestar’s attempt to win The Free Country Tri-Annual Race to the End of the Race, using a metal detector to find buried treasure, and chain-sawing bushes to death in order to gather their precious branches. It’s all madly surreal stuff, brilliantly written and spoken in wonderfully self-mocking internet idiom. And it might remind you of such classics as…such classics as…DAY OF THE TENTACLE!

Apologies for the outburst of dramatic exposition, but the humour’s really rubbing off. It’s just that, what makes Strong Bad’s games so appealing is their refusal to dilute the classic Point and Click format set down by LucasArts in the early Nineties. Although these games often frustrated for their far-out lateral thinking item-based puzzling, they were memorable because the writing which surrounded this, was worth playing for. Each wacky item combination was a path to revealing an even wackier resulting scenario. Just trying to figure these puzzles out made you as mad as the character you were controlling. It hasn’t changed. For example, in S.B’s C.G.F.A.P, how do you steal Homestar’s clothes using only a freshly picked onion?
 
With LucasArt’s rebooted Sam and Max season coming to Wii tomorrow, it seems a few developers have actually realised that Nintendo’s console is perfect for the Point and Click Adventure. The fact that the control interface is well suited to the genre is only part of a wider aptness which the Wii demonstrates. The more important factor of target audience has made itself (often painfully) apparent on the console to date. Let’s be clear for a second. There’s just no denying it: the Wii is primarily for the casual crowd. So is the Point and Click adventure. The genre doesn’t rely on complex control mechanics or any kind of perpetually honed gaming skill such as accuracy, stealth or health conservation. The only route to success is through figuring out the lateral puzzles, which most games shy away from in fear of boring their action-junkie fans. Like the casual mini-game compilations that the Wii is so (in)famous for, Point and Click Adventures don’t require any specific control set-up. There’s no drawing the curtains and turning out the lights like with the Survival Horror; no hunchbacked screen peering like some FPS games. Point and Click adventures are games which don’t require any specific room alteration or body posturing to be played; they adapt to your body, rather than the other way round. Like casual mini-game compilations, anyone can play them, gamer or not. And they can do so whilst sitting or standing in their front rooms as if watching television, or one-handed and lying in bed. But unlike casual mini-game compilations, they’re actually good. Well-written, often genuinely funny and with memorable characters, a good Point and Click game can become as timeless a classic as any hardcore action adventure or R.P.G. So, to all Wii developers: why not follow Strong Bad’s lead and start putting out some quality Point and Click games on the console, rather than follow the now-stale examples of, say, Ubisoft Montpellier or worryingly enough, Nintendo themselves?