/vr/ - Retro Games

My dad was seriously into Pinball as a teen / young adult, to the point he won a few local tournaments. "Local tournament "meaning between the regulars at the bar who regularly played the single pinball machine, and the reward being a cool refillable lighter, but those were the seventies).

Some years after i was born, he would dig out the Pong clone with multiple games and we would play together.

Then we got the Amstrad CPC, and that's when things went downhill. Every game we would play was too hard, broken and impossible, and for a reason. Not reading magazines or getting recommendations, every game we purchased was an unplayable mess by Dinamic, followed by a shit port of an already bad and hard game; Renegade.

Playing with a joystic and jumping with Up (keyboard phobia was a thing) did not help, and the Pinball videogames had pretty mediocre physics. He pretty much slowly lost interest in games to the point of hating them, and to this day he still blames the Amstrad CPC for ruining games for him, although it sounds more like a excuse.

Over the years, he would get Pinball games for every console we owned. Revenge of the Gator, Super Pinball, Tilt, Pro-Pinball Timeshock... It was something we could do together, but there was a problem: a) The games were getting more complex, with digital panels, modes, mini games and b) they were in english (not his native language). He simply did not have the time to invest on a game and compensate, and he gave up completely.

The fact that i went though several years of videogame addiction as a way of coping with... not everybody has a happy childhood or is popular at class, let's leave it there. Were the final nail in the coffin of his now full blown dislike of games.

To this date, even if it got better for me (getting a demanding job did wonders for me), I have not managed to get him into games again. Other than digital sudokus, nothing has worked. Brain Training, the Wii... nothing.