Zeusthecat

My daughter is 4 now and the only games she's been exposed to so far are Final Fantasy 13, the LucasArts adventure games, Minecraft, Animal Crossing New Leaf, Wii Fit, and A Link To The Past. She absolutely loves all of these games and for the most part our game time together consists of me playing and explaining to her what I am doing and why I am doing it. I have found that the games I mentioned above have some level of inherent simplicity in their design that is easily explained and can be understood by a 4 year old. Of these games the only one she has actually played herself is Animal Crossing. It is surprising how fast she was able to pick up the controls and it is pretty awesome seeing her learn how to navigate the town and catch bugs and fish. As far as limits on time goes, our sessions usually don't go over 1 1/2 hours long. This isn't really a mandated limit, but is more of a natural time frame where she stays interested and engaged with the game before wanting to do something else (and that something else is usually Chutes and Ladders which is the bane of my existence). I also make sure to save any violent games for after she goes to bed. Some day when she's older I'll introduce her to more mature themed games but for now I only see those as a detriment to her developing brain. If you have a young kid and what to introduce them to video games the two that I would recommend the most are Secret of Monkey Island and Minecraft. I think Secret of Monkey Island is good because it has an excellent story with some genuinely good humor and the interactions with the world that are necessary to solve puzzles can be easily explained but still require some thought to figure out initially. Minecraft is good because it allows for an incredible amount of creativity and the premise of the game is so fundamental to how human beings work: build shelter, find food, gather resources, and survive. My best gaming experiences so far with my daughter have definitely been with Minecraft. My friend and I have been playing in the same Minecraft world for over a year and a half and we have our own cities, minecart tracks connecting everything over multiple kilometers, vast underground mines, a giant tree with rings of land built around the inside, a treetop city spanning an entire jungle biome, and a bunch of other stuff. So whenever my daughter would play with me I would just take her on tours through everything we built and explain how we did it. It would become ritual to go to certain places and she would basically just tell me where she wanted to go and how she wanted to get there (i.e. through the nether, over minecart tracks, or using a boat). Then we would usually go on some adventure to gather ore, search for new biomes, or just build whatever she wanted to build. Long story short, Minecraft is definitely a perfect game for kids.

This all sounds eerily familiar. I too hated the Playstation and was one of the first kids to get a Nintendo 64 when I was in 6th grade. I don't know why I hated Playstation so much, maybe just because I hated that people thought their "cool kid" 32 bit system was somehow better than my revolutionary 64 bit system. Also, Crash Bandicoot and Twisted Metal were nothing compared to Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64. However, I came around during the PS2 era and put fanboyism aside. Then when the Wii came out I also camped out for a few hours (not sure if that counts as camping out) in front of a store that had a fresh batch of 25 Wiis in stock. I was 23rd in line and had I arrived a few minutes later I would have been fucked. Unfortunately the Wii lost my interest as soon as I picked up a 360 and I only ever used my PS3 as a blu ray player until recently. Now I would say I'm caught somewhere between Sony, Nintendo, and PC. For whatever reason I've just lost all interest in the Xbox brand.

I got some more time in over the weekend and I think I'm getting close to the end now. I last left off at the Vortex place and after exploring that area I was stumped for quite awhile. I couldn't figure out how to get through any of the doors and since I didn't have the plug for the Vortex snow globe thing I couldn't get anything to happen when I used it in the vortex machine. After spinning my wheels for awhile I got lucky when I realized that I could walk further to the right in the magnet cave to find a third magnet. Up to this point I thought there was only the blue and red magnets because there wasn't any obvious indication that there was anything else in the cave. Once I discovered the third magnet I eventually found the right combination to turn on so I could access the big door against the wall. I then talked to the guy inside the big door who told me about Frog Rock and sent me to the ball of twine to retrieve his mood ring. Back at the ball of twine, I found that I could use the golf ball grabber + hand + magnet to get the mood ring out of the twine. I also decided to try going back up to the restaurant at the top and this time when I messed with the binoculars Sam mentioned something about needing to enlarge the image to see Frog Rock. I still had that magnifying lens from earlier so I tried using it on the binoculars and was able to enlarge the image enough to locate Frog Rock and make it appear on my map. Then I went back to the Vortex, gave the dude his moon ring in exchange for Frog Rock instructions, and then headed over to Frog Rock to use the three bunches of bigfoot hair and magical powder stuff as he instructed. After doing so, a weird alien guy that looked suspiciously like the dudes from the Vortex and love tunnel showed up to take my offering and direct me to Bumpusville. Shortly after arriving at Bumpusville, I was treated to one of video games' finest musical numbers while simultaneously discovering what had happened to Trixie and Bruno. It was quite an awesome segment and definitely up there with the Portal ending music as one of my favorite video game music segments. After Conroy exited the stage I explored the house some more and picked up a robot instruction book (by using my golf ball grabber + hand while standing on the truck), a pillow with some hair growth stuff on it, and one of the pictures off of the wall. After reading the book I was able to rewire the cleaning robot to go into the rest of the house which ended up setting off an alarm and distracting the security guy. With him distracted I used the virtual reality machine and got a key for killing the lame dragon. I then used the key to free Trixie and Bruno and stopped playing around this point. So I think I now have to go to the area Bruno mentioned and I expect that I'm close to finishing after that. There are still a couple things that I haven't been able to do yet such as picking up Conroy's hairpiece at Bumpusville and interacting with the ice cream guy at the gas stations so I'm not sure how or if those will come into play.

I know this probably isn't a popular opinion but I think one of the greatest concepts to come out of this generation was achievements. I tend to be a completionist so the introduction of a system that tracks some level of your progress and gaming prowess across all games was awesome. It also added another dimension to single player games since others could see your progress and the crazy shit you pulled off to obtain a hard-to-get achievement. Of course the reality of achievements isn't quite as great as the concept was. There were/are a lot of really shitty ones.

Why not?

I did some major rearranging with my home theater setup and got some new bookcases so I could bring the rest of my video game stuff out of storage.

The topic of the early Xbox Live community reminded me of playing Conker Live and Reloaded on the original Xbox. I played that game online for a couple hundred hours and throughout that whole time it was always the same group of people and we always played on the same map (Castle Von Tedistein). Looking back that was probably one of my favorite times in online gaming because not only could I count on playing with the same friendly people every day, but the way we all played was completely different than the way you would play a multiplayer game today since everybody knew everyone else's playstyle. We would often completely ignore the objectives on the map and instead focus on dominating certain areas of the map with certain classes to prove our superiority. That game rocked.

My god you're right. I played a lot of that game over multiple playthroughs and it totally does exactly that. So yeah, I guess my Groundhog Day game idea isn't very original.

Wario Land on the Virtual Boy is one awesome fucking game. Just figured I'd throw that out there.

SMART PEOPLE ARE STUPID!!!

Thanks for sharing that syntheticgerbil; that was a good read. And Steve Purcell sounds like a totally awesome dude.

For me so far the music in this game hasn't been anything too spectacular but I sat there in Trixie's trailer for at least 10 minutes last night listening to that song. It really resonated with me for some reason. I also managed to get a little further last night after getting the pants and miniature golf ticket from Trixie's trailer. Since the gator golf place had become unlocked I went straight there and got some more information from the redneck guy at the entrance. I also picked up an extendable golf ball grabber which I quickly discovered I could attach the severed hand to (there was something the redneck guy said that hinted at this) along with either the magnet or the cup. I then went onto the gator golf course and witnessed Max freak out on Conroy Bumpus which resulted in him getting golfed into a dunk tank at the other end of the course. I had to find a way to free Max at this point but there didn't seem to be any way to get to him and hitting golf balls into the various objects and alligators around the course didn't seem to have any effect. After being stuck for a little while I remembered something the redneck guy had said about the alligators needing to be fed. I didn't have any luck when I tried to use the bucket of fish on them but then I realized the obvious similarity between the bucket of fish and the bucket of golf balls I had picked up. Sure enough, cartoon logic came into play and the solution was to put the bucket of fish on the ground where the golf balls were and hit the fish towards the gators with the golf club. After seeing how the gators reacted to the fish when I hit them in various locations around the course I figured that I probably needed to get them all lined up with the snake statue to make some kind of a path towards Max (also I assumed this was sort of a reference to Pitfall). After the path was completed I was able to make it to Max and get him out of the tank. That revealed a secret door where I found some sort of vortex snow globe thing. After picking it up a new area opened up on the map around Washington and so I went there and stopped playing around that point. So now I have a new area to explore which will hopefully go towards clearing up a few other outstanding things. Namely the golf ball grabber with hand and magnet/cup attached and the binocular things that are wired up to the elevator back at the ball of twine. Also, I think I got super lucky getting through the gator golf thing without much issue. That was kind of a poorly designed puzzle in my opinion and had I not been in the right (or wrong) state of mind I think I would have been stuck on that for much longer.

I wonder why the Flintstones brand has such a good track record with things that are edible. I'm pretty sure most human beings my age grew up with Fruity (or Cocoa) Pebbles, Flintstones push-up pops, and Flintstones vitamins as an integral part of their diets.

In case I forget to mention this later, I love the music in Trixie's trailer.

Hipsters are the bastard children of skaters and hippies.

Thanks asshole.

Are we arguing about who is an asshole or who is a hipster? Or is hipster the new asshole?

I've never actually played more than a few minutes of Majora's Mask. I'm a horrible person, I know.

Groundhog Day. You relive the same day over and over and watch the same series of events happen each day with slight changes based off of your interactions. Once you eventually discover how to break out of the loop the game's ending would consist of you getting to live one last day and experience the world finally moving forward again.

Huh? I'm not sure I follow. But I am pretty sure that almost every person casts some level of judgment on the quality of other people's fun. It's called having an opinion and being human. Is Chris' opinion about lighters at concerts all that different then me thinking it's fucking stupid that people have fun obsessively following celebrity gossip? Plus, I'm pretty sure your definition of hipster is totally wrong. Someone is only a hipster if they wear a fedora and don't own a tv.

Wait, what? Leggings are very clearly a sub-classification of pants. They are not something you wear instead of pants, they are pants.

If it doesn't make you barf it isn't gross. Unless it makes you shit.

Unless someone like Miyamoto is that content provider. That could be a dream come true (or a hellish nightmare).

I wonder why they felt compelled to add some of these minigames to the various LucasArts games at all. I can't imagine too many people got much enjoyment out of them but maybe they just did it in an attempt to increase replayability? I will admit that I enjoyed the Car Bomb mini game in Sam and Max but all of the others that I've played across the different games so far have been kind of not fun.

At least a bachelor's degree and completion of an early childhood teacher education program. http://www.ehow.com/about_7506285_arizona-preschool-teacher-requirements.html Note that it can be any bachelor's degree, not necessarily one in education. Also, Arizona is on the lower end of the spectrum when it comes to education in the US.