I'd like a translation if it isn't too much hassle. Obviously at your discretion re: the interesting bits or what have you...
no, no hassle, it's good practice for me.
this is the section on war games, i'll PM you a bit more I've done because I don't want to fill up the whole thread.
.....
What things did you use to do together?
Let’s see… I can remember playing games in the shower with him when I was very little. Also I can see him stretched out on the sofa playing games, or taking a siesta and me waking him up, annoying him. When I was a bit older, 12 or 13, when I started to get into computer games, he got me into that really: we played together, argued over the games.
So what did you play? Board games or computer games?
Both, board games first of all though. We played with his friends, games that were all about the Second World War, violent ones. World War II was the thing he was most interested in, all the games related to the campaigns. He liked to go against history.
How do you mean?
There was a game where you were Hitler, you had to conquer Europe and beat off the Allies. He liked this game a lot, he played it a lot.
And he used to win?
(laughs) Don’t remember. But what sticks with me is that he used to change all the settings, the game couldn’t be completed, so he altered it, moved squares around, changed the data, added new endings – trying to follow as much as possible the feel of what really happened, if there had been planes or not, bombers, etc.
And computer games too.
Yeah, those were what I played with him first of all.
Age of Empires?
Yes, but the first one we played together was Civilisation. I remember the first two days were really hard, the stuff that should have taken twenty minutes took more than a whole day, it was tough. We were stuck, we didn’t know what to do. One night I went to sleep and he stayed at the computer, got my mum to stay with him and watch. He woke me up the next day and told me he’d managed to build a boat, and I didn’t believe it, I thought it was impossible to make boats. From then on we became experts in that game, and it turned out that making boats was one of the easiest parts.
And then you moved on to Age of Empires?
Yes, that was different, it was turn-based and in real time. He got really pissed off with one of the units you could use, he refused to put it up with it, it wasn’t plausible. That a monk could capture your units just by looking at it. He hated that, eventually he stopped playing the game.
Did you play against him? Who used to win?
Hmm, you couldn’t do that in Age of Empires, either he played or I did, we never played together. Also, there were ways of cheating he took advantage of, ugly ways of playing. And with the longer games, the World War II games that I liked, we played with him on one side and me on the other, we got tired of them though, either I won and he wouldn’t accept it, or he won and I wouldn’t. We didn’t know how to lose.
You got angry with each other?
I would go to my room and he would come after me. Or else he would go and I would say “why do you leave whenever I’m winning, come back.” That’s how it was. The last game I remember was a board game, a campaign. I was one side, he was the other. I don’t know… The first board game I played with him, he had been playing it for ten years, no exaggeration, actually more than that. You had to read the manual, and I was impatient, I said to him, come on, let’s play without reading all the instructions. We spent two days playing and I was beating him, I was going to win the next day, these are games that take ages, you have to leave them and come back to them. So eventually we come back to the table and he says, we’ve been playing it wrong, I read the manual and it should be such-and-such, and so he totally changed how the game worked and I lost. I stopped, I quit because it was ridiculous, I had been beating him, and now everything was upside-down, for example I had twenty units in one city and he had five, and with his new rules he beat me… I said, this is crazy, don’t tell me it’s not, and then I left. I said to him, you play with your rules and I’ll play with mine. We left it there.
Do you still like to play these games?
Yeah, those strategy games, I do.
