Memory Game
Jan. 13th, 2005 09:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
falcongrrlLately I've been visiting a little piece of my childhood and adolescence.
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foxmagic set me up with something called MAME, or Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator.
What this means is that I'm playing the exact original 80s arcade games on my home computer. Centipede. Qix. Frogger. Space Invaders. The PacMans. I have so many there's no way I could type them all here.
It still feels like cheating to me not to have to put in the coins. :-)
When I think of playing video games, I think of Longboat Key and the Holidome. My family used to go there each summer for a weekend as a sort of mini-vacation. We'd swim in the pools, hang out at the beach, sit in the sauna, eat at the restaurants, play ping pong. And, of course, play video games.
I can still picture where each of the games sat, where I'd stand to play them.
I remember the fourteen-year-old boy I met there when I was twelve. No romance, nothing like that, but we did become friends. He taught me how to play Centipede. Actually, I can't remember his 'tricks of the trade,' just that we played a lot. As in, a LOT. He was good, getting up to about 80,000 or so. Under his expert tutelage, I got pretty handy at reaching the 30,000 or so range fairly regularly. Which was somewhat of a milestone for me at the time. (I got even better at swearing at the little centipede guys. He was, after all, a fourteen-year-old boy. I seem to remember us yelling, "Die! Die, you bastards! Die!" and then giggling.)
He was a 'cool kid'(at least based upon my hesitant definition of the word at the time) who was talking to me...another milestone. (I know what you're thinking...but there were other 'cool kids' there. He had other options. Heh.)
I was never a good player at anything...computer games, sports, it didn't matter. My eye-hand coordination has just always been bad. But annual trips to the beach taught me persistence, perhaps. I got to the point where I always played the same four games so much that I could get passable scores at them, sometimes even high ones.
We didn't usually make these beach trips with just our immediate family. Usually another couple friend of my parents and their kids would go too. Usually it was 'The Wises'. My parents are still friends with them, and they have a daughter my age. Now, we both have two kids of roughly the same age. Then, we were kids ourselves.
She was the undisputed Ms.PacMan champion one summer. I don't know if she read a book or what, but one summer she was playing about like I did and the next she was amazing. She knew the patterns. (I always tried to play with those, but inevitably would screw up, make a wrong turn, and be forced to improvise. Typically me. :-) )
I remember other people gathering around to watch her play and me basking in reflective glory.
I truly loved that, still do. I like watching people whose skill surpasses my own. Perhaps I'm just lazy. I know I'll never attain their level, but I can still enjoy the game being taken to its limits. If it's not by me (and in this lifetime it won't be), then seeing someone else do it is still pretty fun.
Actually playing is fun too. I like both.
There are so many other memories from that time period. I think of going to the arcade in my hometown (something Castle, in the shape of a castle) with the boy I liked and his mom (I think I was 11 at this time) and playing Defender with him. I couldn't play, so he'd help me. I can't remember which buttons he pushed (I was too young for that to be meant in anything but a literal way, that much I do know), only that sense of butterflies in my stomach and the feeling that anything could happen.
I have a friend who likes a recent movie soundtrack (I'm not being coy; I honestly don't know which one) because it has eighties music redux. She said, "It's the songs you loved, but they're all remakes done by different artists, so they don't bring back all that adolescent angst."
God knows, being me, I had enough adolescent angst to fill a cavern, but I don't ever remember those feelings when I hear 80s music, see the movies, or play the arcade games.
Instead, I remember the shivery innocence of anything-can-happen. I remember possibility. And the memory feeds and soothes my soul in ways I can't really explain.
A+
foxmagic set me up with something called MAME, or Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator.What this means is that I'm playing the exact original 80s arcade games on my home computer. Centipede. Qix. Frogger. Space Invaders. The PacMans. I have so many there's no way I could type them all here.
It still feels like cheating to me not to have to put in the coins. :-)
When I think of playing video games, I think of Longboat Key and the Holidome. My family used to go there each summer for a weekend as a sort of mini-vacation. We'd swim in the pools, hang out at the beach, sit in the sauna, eat at the restaurants, play ping pong. And, of course, play video games.
I can still picture where each of the games sat, where I'd stand to play them.
I remember the fourteen-year-old boy I met there when I was twelve. No romance, nothing like that, but we did become friends. He taught me how to play Centipede. Actually, I can't remember his 'tricks of the trade,' just that we played a lot. As in, a LOT. He was good, getting up to about 80,000 or so. Under his expert tutelage, I got pretty handy at reaching the 30,000 or so range fairly regularly. Which was somewhat of a milestone for me at the time. (I got even better at swearing at the little centipede guys. He was, after all, a fourteen-year-old boy. I seem to remember us yelling, "Die! Die, you bastards! Die!" and then giggling.)
He was a 'cool kid'(at least based upon my hesitant definition of the word at the time) who was talking to me...another milestone. (I know what you're thinking...but there were other 'cool kids' there. He had other options. Heh.)
I was never a good player at anything...computer games, sports, it didn't matter. My eye-hand coordination has just always been bad. But annual trips to the beach taught me persistence, perhaps. I got to the point where I always played the same four games so much that I could get passable scores at them, sometimes even high ones.
We didn't usually make these beach trips with just our immediate family. Usually another couple friend of my parents and their kids would go too. Usually it was 'The Wises'. My parents are still friends with them, and they have a daughter my age. Now, we both have two kids of roughly the same age. Then, we were kids ourselves.
She was the undisputed Ms.PacMan champion one summer. I don't know if she read a book or what, but one summer she was playing about like I did and the next she was amazing. She knew the patterns. (I always tried to play with those, but inevitably would screw up, make a wrong turn, and be forced to improvise. Typically me. :-) )
I remember other people gathering around to watch her play and me basking in reflective glory.
I truly loved that, still do. I like watching people whose skill surpasses my own. Perhaps I'm just lazy. I know I'll never attain their level, but I can still enjoy the game being taken to its limits. If it's not by me (and in this lifetime it won't be), then seeing someone else do it is still pretty fun.
Actually playing is fun too. I like both.
There are so many other memories from that time period. I think of going to the arcade in my hometown (something Castle, in the shape of a castle) with the boy I liked and his mom (I think I was 11 at this time) and playing Defender with him. I couldn't play, so he'd help me. I can't remember which buttons he pushed (I was too young for that to be meant in anything but a literal way, that much I do know), only that sense of butterflies in my stomach and the feeling that anything could happen.
I have a friend who likes a recent movie soundtrack (I'm not being coy; I honestly don't know which one) because it has eighties music redux. She said, "It's the songs you loved, but they're all remakes done by different artists, so they don't bring back all that adolescent angst."
God knows, being me, I had enough adolescent angst to fill a cavern, but I don't ever remember those feelings when I hear 80s music, see the movies, or play the arcade games.
Instead, I remember the shivery innocence of anything-can-happen. I remember possibility. And the memory feeds and soothes my soul in ways I can't really explain.
A+
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Date: 2005-01-14 10:34 pm (UTC)The Monkey Island games are probably worth digging up and playing again at some point. A lot of games don't stand the test of time, though. Heh.