PixlBit

I wasn't into the Sierra point and click adventures, but I was into the LucasFilm Games ones for a while.  These include games like Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (my favorite), and Sam & Max Hit the Road.

Since the Internet wasn't around yet, I got my clues in three ways.  1. Back then, games came with all sorts of cool material, some would even give you hints.  In the Zak McKracken game, you were a writer for a fake news tabloid, so the game came with a mock tabloid newspaper where the articles had clues written in them to give you hints.  2. I also subscribed to a LucasFilm Games newsletter that I would get every couple of months or so.  It was a print newsletter I got in the mail, and sometimes it would give hints on games.  That newsletter is also where I discovered Sam & Max comics.  3.  You could order print strategy guides from LucasFilm Games, and I think I did that with a couple of them.

Someday I'm gonna play those LucasArts games like Monkey Island and Indiana Jones. I've wanted to for a long time. 

I never got into point-and-click adventures but they seem cool. No wait, I remember playing Shadowgate. I'm not sure how I figured it all out. Without the internet what are you going to do? Go find someone who's played it before I guess. 

That's funny, you and your dad at Radioshack asking for game hints. I got a recommendation from a dad and his kid at a EB Games once. It was for Wargames: Defcon 1 for PS1. I think they played it together since it had co-op. Mark and I played it and had a blast with it. 

Actually, one time we got a great recommendation at Kaybee toys. It was my little brother's birthday and my mom and I went down there and asked for a good gane for him. The salesman recommended the first Resident Evil game, which I hadn't heard of. And the rest is history. 

The only Sierra adventure game I ever played was, oddly, Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. I played it in secret, LOL, since I was 16 years old and my mom wouldn't have approved of it. My dad probably would have approved of it as long as I didn't tell my mom.

As far as adventure games in general go, the games I got into were the Tex Murphy series, which was kind of a mashup of pulp noir detective novels by Dashiel Hammett (Sam Spade) or Raymond Chandler (Philip Marlowe) with the works of Philip K. Dick (Blade Runner, Total Recall), being set in a post-nuclear 2040s San Francisco. I also played a rather messed up British point-and-click called Dreamweb where your character was ostensibly out to save the world by assassinating seven figures trying to destroy human dreams and bring about nuclear war. The included documentation, however, made it look like your character had descended into madness and was in fact a serial killer. I also dabbled a bit in The 7th Guest and Myst, but around that time, Final Fantasy VI got me back into RPGs, so console RPGs ended up being my preferred adventuring fix.

My dad, up until the 1990s, considered video games to be a complete waste of time and money and grudgingly tolerated me playing them. My mom liked some of the old-school games and still likes match-three style games. But when my dad retired, he and my mom got into The 7th Guest and Myst, and then my dad and I played both played Doom.

I think I borrowed Martian Memorandum from a friend but never really got into it. Those games were more adult... I remember a scene with a woman in lingerie. 

Yeah, it was nice back in those days to bond with a dad with video games. Too bad it didn't last.