Classic Adventures:Great Gatsby is Click Lit

While  the Wii, Playstation and XBox 360 are what most people think of when it comes to "gaming" these days, there's tremendous growth in downloadable and online games for the PC.  Many of these games are easier for older players to play, and can be just as addictive as some of the more intense "enthusiast" games out there—if not moreso.

The key to a good game is a good story. And that's the idea behind many of the Big Fish Games' downloadable adventure games.  One of the latest, Classic Adventures: The Great Gatsby  (also available from I-Play) combines F. Scott Fitzgerald's  with a series of minigames that are more like electronic jigsaw puzzles than first-person shooters.

The game belongs to a category called "hidden object games"—much like the "I Spy" and "Where's Waldo" game books you once kept your kids occupied with. But Gatsby takes that game to new places. Played from the perspective of Nick Caraway, the game combines scenes from the novel  with object searches as well as other challenges such as word puzzles. The closest thing to shooting in the game is a typing game where you "reconstruct" words from Fitzgerald's book.

It's decidedly tame in content in comparison to a lot of the games out there in term of content.About the only thing racy about the whole thing is an interactive game that involves making a gin cocktail.

The LA Times' Carolyn Kellog found the game a bit disappointing, in some ways.:

All this pointing and clicking gives you points, which can be spent to decorate a library. There isn't any payoff other than the points and the well-appointed library: no sitting by the fire in that chair you purchased, no petting the dog you just bought, no reading any of the books you've gleaned from earlier scenes. Just decorating. Sure, Nick had house envy, but given a fancy library, wouldn't he want to enjoy it, to pour himself a martini and relax?