My mother bore me. My mother nurtured me. My mother educated me. She has a resilience unmatched, a love all-forgiving. She is the glue that holds our family together. But right now, I am kicking her ass at video game bowling, and it feels good!
In the 00s, my mum was the best Wii Bowling player in the world. She was unbeatable. Strike after strike after strike. The Dudette in our family’s Big Lebowski. So when she said she was coming to visit us in Canada, I thought the time was right to buy the updated Nintendo Switch Sports version of her favourite game. She’s 76 now, and I might finally have a chance of beating her, I thought, especially if I allowed myself a cheeky tune-up on the game before she arrived.
I fire up Nintendo Switch Sports to get the lay of the land. Tennis and golf have survived the almost 20 years since Wii Sports, along with bowling. The tennis has nothing to keep me entertained for longer than 10 minutes, and I have been terrified of any golf game where you swing a controller since Christmas morning 2009, when my wife surprised me with Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf for the Wii and I surprised her by throwing my back out after a six-hour session on it.
Volleyball and badminton are a double serving of meh. Little kids might find them fun, but not this big one. Basketball has been carried over from Wii Sports Resort, and Chambara is an updated version of fencing. The latter is every bit as chaotic as the original, the former is still a car crash: the hand motion that you have to use to move and dribble is one that I haven’t vigorously practised since I was a teenager. And I don’t want to do it in front of my mother.
If basketball is a fender-bender, then the new football game is a multi-car pileup. It’s a slower, less entertaining version of Rocket League, but one that allows you to strap a controller to your leg to virtually kick the ball. There is no way a 56-year-old man should try to kick something that doesn’t exist. You may as well take a pair of scissors to your hamstrings.
However, just like Wii Sports before it, Switch Sports is worth every penny because of the bowling.
It is the very essence of gaming fun and simplicity, which is great because we were all drunk when we had our first session. Three generations of Diamond family silliness. It was beautiful.
Mum wasn’t without criticisms of the new version. The updated Mii characters are too realistic; she preferred the quasi-abstract shape of the Wii originals. And she is deflated that the Switch just says “spare” rather than “NICE SPARE!”
Her biggest criticism is the size of the Joy-Con controllers compared with the Wii remote.
“I am happier with something bigger in my hands,” she cackles.
She is incorrigible. I know where I get it from.
The next day it was just my mum and I, playing sober. It was a very different kind of gaming, social and laid-back; we talked about how she fell in love with this game during a Christmas at my house back in 2006. My brother was there, with his kids, and my sister-in-law was visiting from Canada. I have zero recollection of this, so thank goodness I have an elderly mother to help me remember things in my dotage.
She loved it so much that when she returned home, she immediately bought her own Wii. It lives and breathes to this day, with all the plastic adornments you got with Wii Sports – the one and only game she has ever played on it.
Introducing her to her favourite game feels like a repayment, because my mum was the one who got me into gaming. She had gone back to school to train as a word processing teacher in the 80s and had an interest in programming, so she bought a ZX Spectrum to learn BASIC – but she never had a chance, as us kids hijacked the machine to go Manic Mining. Yup. Our Atic Atac addiction stopped our mum from essentially becoming Brenda Romero.
Mum claims she introduced me to the “game” that changed my life. Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. She has a point. I type crazy fast, because of Mavis. We reminisce about the last-minute calls to her theatre school when we were short of audience members for GamesMaster, and the joy she felt when I got athletes to wave hello to her on the telly.
I wouldn’t have the life I have had without her.
I hope that my kids get me over for a games night when I am 76, so they can finally best me at Street Fighter II, when my arthritic thumbs can no longer pull off a Dragon Punch. And then I hope that their kids do that with them, and this glorious circle of gaming life continues.
I am so happy to have this time with her to play games again. But I’m even happier for the space we fill around the game, the memories we continue to create. A week after she left, I booted up bowling again, but I only played for 10 minutes before I switched it off. It just wasn’t the same without Mum.
