I’m only about 4 years late trying this game.  I’m actually pretty annoyed that I still had to pay over 20 bucks to get it.  I have to say, though, that Microsoft really got their collective sh$t together when they teamed with Bungie to put this thing out.  Boy oh boy is it slick.  Sure, the marines that are supposed to be helping you are dumb as stumps and the polygons aren’t as high as they would be today but this thing is gorgeous.  I can’t wait to show my dad.

My dad was born in ‘46 so that makes him, let’s say “experienced.”  What I love about my dad, though, is how he caught on immediately to how important computers were going to be (he’s also a lawyer so he’s a pretty smart dude to begin with).  We got our first family PC when I was still in high school so it was somewhere between 1990 and 1995 (now I’m dating myself).  Of course the only thing I wanted to do was to play games on it.  My first game?  Doom 2.  Yes, it was baptism by fire and I was hooked.  My dad, or Isi (pronounced E-C) as I call him, didn’t care for Doom and the space marine saga.  I likened it to how much he liked my choice of music at the time - Metallica, Tea Party and anything else sufficiently heavy to make parents leave the room.  I thought that it was pretty uncool of my dad to not like computer games.  It turns out that I just had the wrong game.

Our next game?  “The most successful PC game of all time…”  MYST.  We peeled the plastic off this one as a family and within the first four and a half minutes my mother, my dad and I were glued to the monitor with the lights down and a pad and pen in hand.  My sister beetled off to her room mumbling something about geeks or nerds or her having been adopted.  I think we probably played about 6 hours together that night and 6 more each night for the next 7 days.  It became a rule that no one was allowed to work on the game alone.  Of course, the biggest discoveries were made when you were playing alone and you had to pretend like you didn’t know how to solve the puzzle the next time the group got together.  Then you made it look really easy and claimed that you “just thought about it a little.”

I digress.  The point is that my dad digs computer games.  My mom does too, for that matter.  That’s why at almost every gift-giving occassion I try to give them a computer game as their present.  With my mom working crazy shifts as a nurse and my dad working every hour he’s not sleeping, a game is the one way for sure that I know they’ll sit down together and enjoy a little clickaround.  Sure beats the bizzarro heads-up Sudoku I caught them playing.

By the way, this year’s Father’s Day gift to my dad (and my mom’s birthday present since they fall on the same day) is The Longest Journey – Dreamfall.  I hope they like it.

Happy Father’s Day everyone.  I’ve got to get back to killing the Covenant and figuring out what the hell this damn Halo is!  … and why my marines want to stand right in my line of fire.