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Old 01-09-2019, 02:14 AM   #10
Tom Guycott
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Gaming with my folks was kinda weird. Mom's experiences were few and far between, and she was more of the "watch YOU play" person, especially when I started getting into RPGs... but the two games that I remember the most with her were vs in NES Pictionary (some of the few times she would suggest she wanted to play someting), and the one day she apparently got a wild hair to go through SNES Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest, and I get home from school in time to watch her going up to the final boss. It is the only game she ever finished that I know of.

Dad, on the other hand, was a different story. He and I would have high-score wars on the 2600. I had a blue binder that we would write scores in (unless it was something like Enduro, where we would measure progress by day number and weather condition). When the NES era came around, he didn't show much interest initially. However, he would eventually get heavy on Black Bass (he likes fishing for real, and the game was apparently a fairly accurate sim, so he would land the big fuckers), Silent Service (he liked the tactical nature) and then he also got into the RPGs I had. To this day, I'm kinda pissed about how he beat Ultima: Exodus before me by skipping a puzzle by luck. And rubbing in that he did so.

SNES/Genesis rolled around, and he wasn't so much into it, but he's the reason why I was able to grasp flight controls (I didn't understand why I was crashing all the time in Jane's F-15) and we rekindled high score battling with Star Fox and Road Rash II in a different blue notebook. Shining in the Darkness was a good time waster, too. You'd think he'd be all about Shining Force, but not so much.

When we got a PC in the mid 90s, he got through Ultima VIII (which was the first time we were introduced to needing to upgrade a PC to run something), Swat 2 (again, liked that tactical nature), and apparently "got so good" at Wing Commander Prophecy that the game glitched (there was a mission that had somehow become impossible to win... he would instafail as soon as he hit the checkpoint to protect a convoy). That wasn't supposed to happen, yet it would occur every time after his first couple of playthroughs (he was going for score on the ingame killboard at this point). We actually had to uninstall AND scrub the partition to fix the problem.

If mom were still around, I'd wager she would have taken to watching let's plays on YouTube, especially of narrative driven titles or watch some tomfoolery happen in Skyrim like force shout ragdolls.

Dad's a toss-up, because he'll either find something like X-Com to throw himself into, a shooter with a high score table, or more than likely not bother at all and go watch a movie.

This answer was way longer than it needed to be, but kinda cathartic.

And if I had to distill everything to a simple answer, I would have to go back to the 2600 version of Space Invaders and/or Missile Command for all three of us. Mom would play those a couple of rounds if dad an I were playing.
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