Me And My Dad:
1: Video Games
Growing up my Dad and I had a great relationship. I don't have any vivid memories of him shouting at me or us fighting over trivial things (although I am sure they did happen). Looking back over my memories of growing up with my Dad I can totally see where my love for movies, video games, horror, reading, quizzing and cooking came from. For my next few posts I am going to delve in to each of these a little further...starting with Video Games!
I am now 36...my Dad is 64. Two days ago he sent me a WhatsApp message with a link to a video on YouTube for a recent video game called "Thimbleweed Park". He wrote:
"Have you seen this? It is done by some of the guys who did Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion. It look's great"
Reading that made so many good memories float back from the late 80s/early 90s when my Dad and I were obsessed with Point and Click Adventure Games on the PC. I was really lucky to have a home PC as not many people had them back then. My Dad has always worked in computers and he set up his own business teaching people how to use them. Because of this we had a PC in our dining room and because of this my Dad and I discovered many great, great games. Here are 5 of them and the memories I have of playing them:
Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge
This was the very first Point and Click adventure game I played with my Dad. My Dad borrowed it off somebody he worked with and it was our first furore into this genre of game. We would sit for hours when he got in from work and on weekends trying to solve the puzzles and working our way through the story. This game still stands up today as one of the best Point and Click adventure games of all time so we definitely chose a good one to start with.
Eric the Unready
A slightly more obscure game in the Point and Click genre as it was more of a text based adventure with images. But boy was it a good game. My most distinct memory of this involved a puzzle where you had to make a contraption to get a ball from A to B. There were loads of traps in the way and one of these was a snake in a cage which would eat the ball. We spent days and days and days trying to solve the puzzle then one day my Dad came in from work very excited! He told me how he was binding some papers together and he had used a rubber band. He told me that we had a rubber band in our inventory on Eric the Unready. My brain put it together and we excitedly put the game on and we tried putting the rubber band on the snake's mouth....and it worked! We felt so clever!
LucasArts Collection
We bought this when we were on holiday in the USA one summer. We randomly went to Price Club one day (which is a bit like Costco) and whilst looking through the games available we saw this collection. It was about $15 and it had 5 games: Monkey Island, Loom, Maniac Mansion, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Zak McKracken. 5 games we hadn't played. When we got home we played through all 5 and we enjoyed them all...although I am sure we never finished Zak McKracken or Maniac Mansion as they were pretty tough.
Discworld
This was our first trip into a really difficult P&C game and a one that we really had to think about. Remember, this was before the days of just going online and looking up a guide so you had to really work things out. This game was ridiculous though and contained some of the hardest puzzles we had ever encountered in a game. A lot of them didn't make any sense at all. One of my favourite memories of this game though is that my best mate, Richy, came and played it with us as it was the summer holidays. My Dad was a teacher at the time so he was off with us and we literally spent every day working through this game. It was rock hard but together the three of us were able to finish it. Sadly the sequels were nowhere near as good.
Myst
This game was revolutionary at the time! The graphics were unlike anything we had seen before, the gameplay was a bit more advanced than a bog standard P&C game and there was very little direction or guidance throughout it. This was a game where you really had to just try and try and try and try to get through it. I have to admit, however, that we really struggled to put it all together and we had to resort to buying a guide. This was the first time we had ever needed help from anything other than our brains but using our brains and the guide we were able to do it. It was a very rewarding experience and I have great memories of playing this with my Dad.
Sadly around the time of Myst being released the P&C genre was dying out. There were very few releases after that and very few games that we played together. There was also the fact that I was a teenager and I was starting to spend more time with my friends and playing on consoles rather than on the PC. The genre has seen a bit of a resurgence of late with HD releases of many of the classic P&C games we played back in the day such as Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle.
Obviously now I live with my own family and my Dad no longer has a home PC so we don't play games like we used to which was naturally going to happen. But the memories I have will always live on and we regularly talk about it and remember the great games, the rubbish ones, the easy puzzles and the rock hard puzzles that totally perplexed us. Great memories and great times.
And on that note I will sign off.
Until next time...
The Twiglet's Dad
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