For most of my life, I would have told you that I was a huge fan of adventure games. I was so sad when, after the advent of first person shooters and other intensely competitive, reflex-based games in the mid-to-late 90's, this storied genre of game fell by the wayside. And then, a decade or so later, adventure games started to make a bit of a comeback. And I started playing some of them again, and even going back and replaying some classics from the early days that I had missed as a kid. And I realized something.

These games aren't very much fun at all.

I was wrong about myself, and had been for a while. I'm not a fan of point-and-click or text-parser adventure games. Scouring pixel art pictures for items to pick up or buttons to push, cheap instant deaths, horrifyingly obscure puzzles that nobody is going to figure out without a guidebook - the basic mechanics of an old-school adventure game just aren't very enjoyable. They're not enjoyable now, and they weren't really enjoyable when I was a kid either. Mostly, they're frustrating and irritating, if not terminally boring. So how did I wind up being so wrong about my own taste in games?

I blame Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist. Although this game is essentially obscure abandonware at this point, I absolutely loved this game when it came out. Freddy Pharkas was one of the last adventure games produced by Sierra. It had full voice acting, lush hand-drawn artwork, and an absolutely hilarious script written by Al Lowe, creator of the Leisure Suit Larry series (which had been previous called, and I am not making this up, Soft Porn Adventure, in case you were wondering about the level of humor present in Lowe's games). Granted, Pharkas had a lot of dirty jokes (that mostly sailed over my head as a kid), but it also had a lot of just good old fashioned one-liners and character-based situation comedy as well.