Back before computer games required wallet-emptying hardware upgrades, point-and-click adventures were the shit.

Though a giant leap beyond the text-based Zorks of yore, these “graphical adventures” involved exploring a series of mostly static settings, point-and-clicking with your mouse to solve puzzles.

The pinnacle of this era was 1985’s Deja Vu: A Nightmare Comes True. Developed for the original Mac, this first-person detective yarn began with a doozy: “You wake up in a toilet with no memory of how you got here. Looking at your forearm you see fresh needlemarks and wonder if you have been injected with something. Then you realize that you can't remember who you are!” In other words, it totally ruled.

This classic has been re-released over the years (most recently for Pocket PC) but the rise of the Nintendo DS has now ushered in a new generation of point-and-click--or rather, tap-and-drag since the mouse has been replaced with stylus and touch screen.

Sure, there are flash-based old-school PnCs about, but they can’t compare with 1997’s The Last Express (an awesome rotoscoped, real-time murder mystery now available again via GameTap) much less the DS’ Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney series and Hotel Dusk: Room 215.

The new Phoenix sequel, Justice For All, continues the cult fave’s wacky courtroom antics as you take the semi-competent defense attorney through a series of increasingly oddball court cases and crime-scene investigations.

It’s still great fun--try yelling “Objection!” into the DS mic while riding public transit--but the novelty factor has been passed on to the slower-paced Hotel Dusk, which also picks up the “game noir” torch from Déjà Vu.

Set in 1979 with a hand-drawn art style straight out of “Take On Me,” you play a disgraced detective-turned-traveling salesman searching for your long lost ex-partner who’s been missing since you, um, shot him. That answer, and several others, lies within the dilapidated titular hotel if you can decipher the clues and convince enough shady guests to spill the beans.

It sounds like a hardboiled mystery novel and, well, it essentially  is--you even hold the DS sideways as if reading. Consider it a digital Choose-Your-Own-Adventure penned by Raymond Chandler and animated by A-Ha.