Over the past two days I’ve been playing Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney (DS), the fourth installation in the Ace Attorney series. Like its prequels, Apollo Justice is a lawyer simulation game: you investigate clues and prove your client innocent via creative use of evidence and witness testimonies. But unless you salivate at the idea of the LSATs or take bar exams for fun, the chances are high that playing a lawyer doesn’t seem very enticing to you. I can’t even look at the Constitution without yawning, but for some reason I still can’t stop playing this game.

Maybe it’s the clever script and witty dialogue that’s so sorely lacking in most other games. Maybe it’s the loveable cast of appealing characters. Or maybe it’s the fact that it’s the perfect throwback to the genre that used to take over my life like some sort of delicious pixilated heroin – adventure games.

The adventure genre used to be a mainstream giant primarily due to two companies, LucasArts and Sierra. Their successes included The Secret of Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, King’s Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Maniac Mansion, and hundreds more, including a plethora of sequels. These games were revolutionary; not only did they include puzzles that required innovative thinking and sometimes-impossible-without-a-walkthrough solutions, most of them had such clever humor that they still stand up as hilarious today.

So what did ever happen to the adventure game? As in any free market, companies cater to what customers desire, and the desire for adventure games simply died out with the times. Many gamers who grew up on adventure games are no longer gaming, and many younger gamers, brought up in a new-aged flashy entertainment industry, don’t understand the appeal of slow-moving games.

There are some games today that fall under the adventure label; Hotel Dusk: Room 215, Professor Layton and the Curious Village, and a few other DS games fit the bill well. Sam & Max Hit the Road, an old and popular graphical adventure game, was recently revived as an episodic series that has been critically acclaimed. Hopefully companies will pick up on these successes; the gaming world moves in cycles, so maybe one day we’ll even see a complete resuscitation of the genre. Here’s to hoping.

Meanwhile, I’m going to go pretend I’m a lawyer.

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