I'd made a few posts in the past about how awesome it is to have a family that actively plays games. I trained my sister on Goldeneye before she could properly speak, my mom's openly admitted that she loves the Wii (though she took it back when we started chanting "ONE OF US..."), and my dad's the man that started me on the NES before I was even in Preschool.

Coming out of Retirement

Over the years, I've been playing a lot more games; different genres, different systems, the whole nine yards. My dad, on the other hand, is in his mid-50's; he works, he actively exercises, and his eyes are going, meaning he can really only play console games, and can only play sparingly. He never really stopped playing; Zelda is still an old standby, and he's picked up a taste for shooters as well as the Prince of Persia trilogy, but for a few years, he just wasn't playing that much.

When my mom caught WiiFit fever over the summer, she was sad to hear that I'd be taking the Wii to school with me like every other year, and decided to buy her own in order to keep working out (which is going really well, mind you. She owns two exercising games that she plays regularly, and she's lost a good amount of weight). My dad saw this as an opportunity to start gaming more, and promptly bought Resident Evil 4 for the Wii, which he only got because "IGN gave it a good score, and it was only 25 bucks".

RE4, as we all know, is a quality game, and once he sat down and played it, he was totally hooked. I've never seen him this obsessed with a game since the SNES. Since then, I've been actively engaging him in game-related conversation, trying to relight that old spark he used to have. He'd talk about how awesome some of the bosses are, or how brutal the game was on Hard.

I'm a Bad, Bad Son

He was disappointed, then, to hear that the next RE would not come out for the shiny white box.

Flash forward to mid-January; my dad's had his brand new LCD TV for over a year, and it's time to upgrade from DVD to Blu-Ray. With Christmas over, prices for Blu-Ray players went back up to their standard price. At the same time, Mr. Dale North made a post about Dell's sale on PS3s; $60 off. I showed it to him, and he laughed.

Then I planted a seed into his brain. A carefully crafted sentence that would burrow deep into his cerebrum, haunting him every day for weeks.

"But you know, if you're going to spend $300 on a Blu-Ray player, why not spend the extra $40 and get a PS3?"

You see, I'm an awfully manipulative person, and hey, if he bought a PS3, then I wouldn't have to buy one. And then I'd have a reason to visit them during the school semester. So everybody wins, right?

Of course I'm right.

Eventually, the PS3s were backordered, to which my dad simply said "too bad". But he kept talking about that PS3, even without me instigating a conversation. Skip to late January, when I went home to visit. The rat bastard ordered a PS3 from Dell before they ran out, but kept it a secret from me. I guess that's what you get for trying to manipulate your own father.

Dad, Me, and PS3

With his new toy hooked up, he went out and bought Assassin's Creed because, like RE4, "IGN gave it a good review, and it was only $25". I was hoping he'd get the new PoP game, but I was fine with it. I played a little myself, and it was kinda neat for awhile. Eventually, I decided to get Valkyria Chronicles, because copies of that game will go extinct soon. My mission was to try and get him to play, but he's sworn off RPGs ever since we rented Final Fantasy III years ago. Renting Chrono Trigger just pushed him further away, much to my dismay.

But now that Assassin's Creed has been beaten, our house has wifi, and my dad has a PSN account, it's time to convince him to get a new PS3 game. He really wants to play multiplayer games online with his newfangled wi-fi, and he wants to bond with me over some multiplayer games, so I'm pushing hard for him to get Street Fighter IV, though I fear he'll never grasp the simple Hadoken.

A shooting game, maybe? He loves shooting people in the face.

Regardless of what I trick him into buying for me next, I'm happy to see us finally talking about videogames as much as we used to during the SNES era, watching my dad claw through the Donkey Kong Country trilogy, or writing down endless codes for Mega Man X together. I still remember the night my dad beat Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, whooping and hollering, declaring himself "The Champ". Those were great times.

I guess the moral of the story is that anyone can get into gaming, but I think a lot of gamers just aren't communicating with others well enough. I've trained my girlfriend to finally use the dash button in Super Mario World, and I've been coaching a coworker in Super Smash Bros. Hell, I've managed to convert my best friend and his fiancee to the Pokemon metagaming community, and they're serious competitors now; something I never predicted.

But when you can learn to share what you love with other people (in this case, games), and learn to bring them into your world, you'll be surprised by how they respond. I know that sounds really obvious and preachy, but sometimes it's nice to be reminded of these things.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to figure out how to convince my mom that shooting your head in Persona 3 isn't suicide.