I'm not sure what Shadowgate counts as in today's categorizations, but I recall that one particular game-critical gem was one or two pixels wide. It was hidden against a black background, but it was still tough to find.

Meh, the input style changes but they're still all adventure games. PaC is simply to differentiate it for the people who call anything with an adventure in an adventure game.

Graphical adventure used to be the term to show the move away from text only, then point and click to show the move away from keyboard control. It's still one genre. ;)

point and click adventures i spend my whole youth with, i even learned english by printing out walkthroughs and play a game that way with the old typing sierra adventures.
sadly the genre died, and only like 1 or 2 a year a good point and click adventure comes out. (whispered world, ghost pirates of voodoo island, unwritten tales, edna breaks out/harveys neue euge)

to me it feels like an interactive book/movie, and in most games you crawl into the hero or be there as some sort of sidekick. some adventure games can be frustrating (especially if it has mazes) but they arent all like that. and its never a shame to use a walkthrough if you are really stuck. and if you dont want to use that, there is always the uhs website/program that give you slight hints. these are games that let you think atleast unlike any type of fps.

Monkey Island for sure - although I think only the first 3 are great, the rest (including Telltale's Episodes) were decent, but didn't strike me as being on the same level.

LucasArts produces fantastic adventure games that are funny, creative, and generally fun to play. I would recommend any of them, but especially Monkey Island 1-3, Indiana Jones & The Fate of Atlantis, Sam & Max Hit the Road, Day of the Tentacle, and Full Throttle.

Broken Sword is another favourite of mine. Very different tone than the games I mentioned earlier, but has a nice story and solid puzzles to solve.

Contrary to popular opinion, I don't think Syberia & The Longest Journey are as great as everyone says they are. The story and atmosphere are nice, but I thought the puzzles and the gameplay itself in those games could have been much improved.

Sierra adventures are... okay. They're good in that many are funny and entertaining, but bad in that they're known to screw with you by randomly killing you or otherwise make the game unsolvable. Probably not my first choice for somebody who isn't really into the genre.

So... in short I'd definitely go with either Monkey Island (pick up the Special Edition on Steam during the holiday sale) or Broken Sword 1.

Yes and no. I agree with 1 & 2, those are really bad design choices, and sometimes they can be found in the best of P&C adventures. That's not enough to make me hate the genre though, not even the titles in question, unless it occurs again and again. And I don't see 3 as a problem at all, because I love the interactive story aspect and most adventure games I've played weren't as extreme as you describe ('work to watch'). In the good P&C adventures interacting with the environment is a reward in itself, not work. And the story is told through your actions, too, not just cutscenes and long conversations (although sometimes the balance can be a bit off - TLJ, I'm looking at you :P ).

I usually enjoy P&C adventures a lot until I'm really stuck and have to resort to a walkthrough after wandering around aimlessly and making several desperate and unsuccesful attempts to move on. Sometimes that helps me to continue with the same enjoyment; sometimes the solution really annoys me, and then if a similar thing occurs, I admit I get more impatient with the game and check the walkthrough more often. For that reason, I don't mind easy adventure games at all. The less I have to look for help, the more I enjoy it.

I think the better adventure games aren't strictly linear when it comes to puzzle solving. They allow you to solve a certain amount of puzzles in any order, so that when you get stuck with one, you can concentrate on one of the other first (the Monkey Island games come to my mind, IIRC, or more recently I found that quality in Time Gentlemen Please!). In good adventure games there's always so much to do that you don't feel railroaded and are not bored quickly, unless you already have a general dislike for the gameplay.

EDIT: It just occured to me that I probably prefer humoristic adventures over serious story-telling because each observation can end in a punchline and make me laugh, while in the serious games puzzles might get in your way when you're really impatient to know how the story continues. (But that doesn't mean I'm fond of the redundant self-referential and over-the-top parodies of many post-classic adventures that consider themselves humoristic.)

15 years ago i used to play them alot, but i dont play these games anymore. i get too bored with them these days, even the free ones that i've gotten like Broken Sword from GOG, i dont play.

I always considered the guidebooks as a joke and more of a collectible item for fans then anything. I never needed them, and i'm not special, then again, i was late to the party anyway, since i've played Sierra games in early 90s. I liked how they inserted the one in SQ4 with absurd hints and one obvious one. Don't really see how that's bad.

Anyhow, as adventure games go, and the subject of linearity and movies was touched, i'd have to say linearity really worked for adventure games. Josh Mandel in the recent interview with Matt Barton made an interesting observation, on how linearity helps in delivering great storytelling. Great and funny guy, if You guys never seen this, i urge You to sacrifice some time to watch it.

I wonder what Don Bluth's Laserdisc games count as. I mean, they're a sort of cross between point-n-click and arcade, because you don't control all the character's movement like you do in a platformer or whatever. It's kinda like a "point-n-click on rails". Like, the whole game is one big quicktime event.

I think the OP summed up my thoughts pretty well (though with perhaps more vitriol). I used to play them and enjoy them when I was younger. I haven't been able to get into them since. And I've tried. I played and beat Broken Sword because it was considered one of the best, but there's no way I would have finished it without the generous hint system. I enjoyed the characters and some of the dialogue was really funny, but i just couldn't see myself playing a lot of these as I feel too hands-off. I found it tedious and was eager to put the game behind me.

I understand why some people love this genre, but I'll never be one of them.

I loved them as a kid when I first got into PC gaming. I played almost every Sierra and Lucasarts classic, along with a bunch of others. Sadly now-a-days I find them boring 95% of the time.

I keep buying them, the really well reviewed ones anyway, but I barely ever play them.

Love the genre but some games suffer from the OP's complaints (not all though).
Monkey Island series, Broken Sword (though I seem to recall one case of 'but I tried that before and it didn't work then')
Usually if I need to look at a walkthrough for this type of game then it's either the same thing I tried but in a different way or something completely illogical - those are the games that put me off.

there's still some people giving it love (with various degrees of success)
Try www.bigbluecup.com for lots of free fan-made games, some actually good, lots cr*p.
(It's the home of Adventure Game Studio, freeware DIY adventure tool).
Try Ben There Dan That for some humour (British cultural knowledge may be needed) and 5 Days a Stranger for some low-graphic but atmospheric chiller.

The Longest Journey. Arguably the best point & click adventure game on GOG catalogue.

I have trouble believing in your example. An adventure game that denies you access to an essential item for any reason at all is a bad adventure game. If you're unable to figure out the solution through dialogue or clues left around the game, then it's either a bad adventure game or you're not listening hard enough. Often puzzles will not have dialogue clues, and will be based around experimentation, one example being getting the herring off the seagull in Monkey Island. Again, it sounds like you have a bad adventure game. A good adventure will place you in the driver's seat, you're not just a camera (a la DNF or Half-Life), you are the protagonist. Your actions should feel like they are contributing to the overall plot. If they don't, then it's a bad game or you're not appreciating it enough. An adventure should feel more like a book with yellowed pages and that lovely smell.

I'm going to point you in the direction of early LucasArts adventures, particularly Monkey Island (stay away from Escape from Monkey Island). The Dig is perhaps the most plot-centric game I've ever played.

I'd also like to point you to Wadjet Eye Games, an indie dev named Dave Gilbert who is responsible for The Blackwell Series, Emerald City Confidential (not very good) and publishing Gemini Rue.

No single adventure is representative of the whole genre. That's not how adventure games work. Adventures are the best examples of video games as art; suggesting that Gemini Rue is even anywhere near representative of LucasArts is like trying to compare a classical artist with an interpretive one.

I won't claim to be the be all and end all expert on adventures, to do that I'd have to play every single one, but I will say that it sounds like you've been playing a really, really bad adventure. If you're doing this, you're doing it wrong and so are the fanboys.

I've played and finished a great many adventure games. Pretty much all of the major ones. I love them. But I very much agree that the genre is inherently broken. There has always been this great gap between the story and the gameplay; some games have it impossibly wide (the Syberias are a particularly terrible example here), some do their best to bridge it (Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis probably remains the best adventure game ever made if we're talking about the overall experience and not the individual aspects -- those have been better elsewhere, but this game really is exceptionally well designed). To my knowledge, not a single one has joined the two elements together perfectly.

That being said, what you described is not common for all games. Both of your first two points are indicative of bad design, and the third is debatable, and also depends on which kind of game you play. Yes, many adventure games are too much film-like for their own good, but that was also due to their technological limitations. But then there are games like The Dig which originally were supposed to be films, but through development became something different -- you could not possibly make a The Dig film that would do the game justice, as it's all about the pacing and the atmosphere now.

Also, it has been argued (by Erik Wolpaw himself, actually) that Portal 2 is in fact a latter-day manifestation of the adventure game genre. And the integration of gameplay and story in that game is excellent. The puzzles kind of suck, but the framework is brilliant.