TOG - The Older Gamers

YZ250 · 20th July 2007, 02:13 PM

Just reading some of the great comments in here got me thinking, I remember when I bought home my Commodore 64, just picked it up from Kmart lol. I thought I'll put it on the TV in the parents lounge room, a bigger tv than my portable.

Anyway the old lady gets home and screams get that off my TV you'll blow it up, it was like I had found a dead Alien in the backyard, and was trying to do an autopsy on the Lounge floor.

So it was back to my portable tv in my room. Funny there she is at 60 odd years old playing around on her own PC.

Did anyone else have trouble with introducing their Parents to PC's and gaming machines?

I can still here my Dad saying " Its just a passing fad, that will be laying out in the shed with all the rest of your rubbish"

This was coming from a Dad who declared after I got into Kiss in 1978 that they wouldnt last. 29 years later they are still going.

Deadfyre · 20th July 2007, 05:13 PM

My folks tried to game. It was sorta funny in retrospect. I remember my mom trying to play super mario brothers. I dont think she ever made it past water world. The entire time she would play, her body would sway in time to the jumps she would make. She didn't curse much, but give mario some fireballs and she cursed like a sailor.

My dad was a real fan of duck hunt, but to him the 1st Zelda was absolutely legendary. He was so proud when he finally beat Gannon.

My folks were technologically impaired, but they made the best of it. Trying to explain the proper commands to init an old 2400 baud modem. I would always write the commands down with the number, but the paper would always get lost. So I would get woke up at 5am when one of them was awake and wanted online.

They both liked to use the computers too but that took some doing to explain everything properly to them.

Some fond memories when I dwell on it.

Thanks for the reminder.

Ancient_One · 21st July 2007, 12:06 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Deadfyre

The entire time she would play, her body would sway in time to the jumps she would make. She didn't curse much, but give mario some fireballs and she cursed like a sailor.

Mate I do that even now and I'm not that old. My wife and kids get a laugh at me playing trying to peer around corners, not my character, me. Jumping and unusual movements of my characters being excentuated by my hands flying all over the place with the controller.

Curse like a sailor. I'm an ex sailor mate and hell yeah. Sometimes you need to vent in games. It can be so frustrating.

Drac · 21st July 2007, 01:34 AM

Our Arati 2600 went flying. I remember that day very clearly.

My two older brothers and my cousin, all around 8-10 were fighting over "who's turn it was next", I was 6, and thus only qualified for a "turn" after everyone else had two turns each, as is the way of things when you're the youngest. Anyway, one of my brothers (the middle one) was pressing that it was still his turn after his avatar died (can't remember which game it was, maybe frogger) because my cousin distracted him or something, but it was my oldest brother's turn next, naturally insisting that he now have the controller. A large argument burst forth that caught the ears of our parents, one in a lengthy series of fires erupting from the Atari they has been extinguishing all school holidays.

In the end, my father's solution was to rip the console from the TV/Wall and toss it from the 2nd story balcony across the yard where it hit the ground and exploded, in slow motion, into many splintery peices as we all watched in horror. This my seem extreme, but the argument was fairly heated and it wasn't the first time this had happened. I wasn't completly faultless either, being the youngest and most adept and covertly causing mayhem, I encouraged both sides of the argument whilst hinting that if they couldn't both agree then it should of course be my turn, and before you knew it everyone was yelling at everyone else. So the end did somewhat jusify the means, we were all just too naive to see it comming.

I also distinctly remember my brother collecting the largest peices and whilst sobbing pleading with our father that it really was "still his turn" as if my dad could fix it and he could still play.

Funny when I think back on it, but it was a very gloomy thing when you're six. We got another (second hand) atari about 6 months later as we still had heaps of games, but we had learnt our lesson and were all much more civil about "who's turn it was" form then on.

Deadfyre · 21st July 2007, 07:13 AM

My son still tosses his PS2 controllers every now and again. It pisses him off when we make him wait a month to buy a new one. It pisses me off that he throws them though. He is 14, you would think he would know better then to do that.

I keep a box of his broken controllers in the garage. There are 5-6 of them out there.

I laugh actually.

Ancient_One · 21st July 2007, 10:47 AM

When he's old enough and earning his own cash ask him to reimburse you for them.

Teach him a lesson in money.

Deadfyre · 21st July 2007, 10:51 AM

Yeah we try to stress the money issues on whats right and wrong about it. Save vs spend, want vs waste and all that. I think in a couple years I will hit him up for controller money.

Good thought that one.

Worzi · 24th July 2007, 01:33 AM

I never had a commodore 64. Instead I got the Atari 800 (though I never found a cartridge for that right slot) It was hooked up to a small portable TV and I was not allowed to put it on the family room TV because it would "burn the screen". I even had to learn how to use a fire extinguisher in case my portable TV screen "burned".....No Joke

The RAM was expandable. The machine came with a whole 16K of RAM (yes young ones, I said "kilobytes") which we upgraded to 64K. That "chip" was 6 inches long and about 3 inches tall x 1 inch wide (was actually 2 32k chips)
The only game I ever got for it was Star Raiders. All other games required typing in endless lines of DOS code to make a stick figure jump.

We did have a 2400 baud modem which I remember one christmas we got a subscription to the AOL BBS which was nothing more than a blue screen with white letters. Funny AOL still runs about the same.

bigtabs · 24th July 2007, 01:46 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Deadfyre

Yeah we try to stress the money issues on whats right and wrong about it. Save vs spend, want vs waste and all that. I think in a couple years I will hit him up for controller money.

Good thought that one.

Well don't forget about inflation, that will be 2 useful lessons wrapped up into one.

My Dad was the one who got me into computers, not the other way round. He's always been a technology nut. Had me programming a ZX81 when I was four and we never looked back.