Father's Day Retrospective

It's a three hour drive, minimum, from Chicago to Decatur. The Girl and I have now made the round trip twice in as many weeks, once primarily to see my brother and then another to do Father's Day since The Girl's father would be, well, conveniently in town and all. And for those of you who don't live in the Midwest ... my apologies because we're having just about the best weather on the planet right now.

For his birthday, I got my dad two games. Rome: Total War and The Missing. I think The Missing actually kinda freaked him out ... the whole ARG genre possibly being a bit of a stretch for him, and Total War arrived completely broke. What's humorous about this is some two decades ago he granted my brother and I our first computer and warned us it wasn't for use with Space Turkeys. Space Turkeys was his symbol of wasteful computer games, based on a ad with blazing words about blasting such cosmic fowl.

Needless to say, that ban didn't last very long. That's right Joe Lieberman - even back then kids could get their hands on computer games. Violent? Heh, try playing the 2D side scroller of Conan sometime. Or even Karateka.

But I digress. The fun part was when a flight simulator errantly found it's way onto my father's laptop some year later. An avid pilot, he would play this ... well, let's just say obsessively. The family got an Intellivision and Dad was simply the best at Night Stalker. We'd watch him play just so that we could see the next robot that we couldn't beat. More recently this has moved to a Nintendo 64 ( he was quite the GoldenEye fan ) and GameCube ( a true Need for Speed freak ).

So, the truth is that Dad isn't just a gamer. He's actually a little hardcore. With access to a LAN party I think he'd not only attend, but there'd be some trash talking as well.