I played this on my IBM as a kid and loved it, just had to buy it and do it again :D it just has cute and lovable music and characters.

Honestly I kinda had the opposite reaction.

I bought Simon the Sorcerer 1 (and 2 though I never played it before) because I fell inlove with it as a child. Yet little did I know that the child me was SPARED!

I actually find WAY too many puzzles in this game to be the kind of puzzles that Point and Click adventure games get a bad wrap for. I don't mean cripplingly difficult puzzles or Moon logic puzzles, afterall nothing is wrong about a tough puzzle and Moon Logic is simply about bending your thinking to the game.

I mean pixil hunts that blend into the background, invisable object hunts, excessively timed sections that take too long to get back to, solutions that clearly make no sense and that you will only find through trial and error, Solutions that make NO SENSE that you will find because they are the only logical solution. Sometimes the solution will be the object you didn't see in a place you fully explored 3 times already, or better yet sometimes the answer to the puzzle will be the same solution you attempted but with a nonsense reason why it didn't work.

To me the trick to telling the difference between a hard puzzle ande a bad puzzle is that you will either say "Ohh so that was it" or "Why didn't I think of that?" and if it is a bad puzzle you will say "Well how was I supposed to know that?" or "Are you kidding me?"

To me Simon the Sorcerer is kind of a good dialog and character game wrapped in a bad point and click adventure game. Heck Simon the Sorcerer 2 was so jarring because Simon in the first game was somewhat of a good guy if a bit sarcastic and rude, yet Simon in the second is in total jerk mode. So I know I liked Simon if I paid that much attention.

Then again my dislike of the gameplay aspect could be mostly because I refuse to use guides if I can help it.

Ultimately if I had to give an example of a point and click adventure that failed as a "game"... Simon the Sorcerer would probably be one of my choices.

If you press F10 (i think or one of the others) it will highlight anything you can click on.
Handy when you're really stuck and might have missed the smallest of things.