I wrote a little bit about gaming with my son last time around. It’s fun, and it’s shared fun with him. He gets a lot out of it, and because of that, I do as well. But this time, I want to talk about gaming around my son, and how that affects what and when I play.
He Sees Everything
I do most of my gaming on my phone now. Quick games are the most compatible with my life at this point, so lots of turn-based strategy, puzzle games, shooters or racing games. The shooters are strictly for when the kid is not around, as he is always insanely curious as to what’s going on on my phone and I don’t want him watching me shoot terrorists with high powered sniper rifles. Strategy games have lots of text and numbers, so he tends to get antsy if I play those around him, thinking perhaps I’m working too hard and should instead play “yell at the ceiling” instead.
Even on my small hand-held device, I have to be aware of what he’s seeing, so I try to play a few all-ages games in the event that he will slide up and sit on my lap to watch me play.
Our favourite over the last couple of months has been a racing game called “SUP Multiplayer Racing“. Keith called it a “hot wheels game” when he saw me playing it. That’s not too far off. It’s a 2-lane, 4 car PvP game with pretty simple controls, with all the bells and whistles that appeal to me in a car game; levelling up car parts and swank paint jobs. (If it played Snoop Dogg’s cover of ‘Riders on the Storm’, it’d be perfect, and if you get that reference, you’re perfect.)
The kid is obsessed with the game. He pressures me to progress, demanding my acquisition of new cars and lamenting any race I lose as both a titanic defeat and in critical judgement of my skills as a racer, nay, father.
I like it because I can play a few races on my coffee break, and if I do get a new paint job for my best car, I have someone I can then show it off to, without having to force the wife into pretending she’s excited. (A task she does not do well, mostly due to lack of effort on her part.)
Dollar Store Comics
The Dollaramas in the city just snuck a few hardcover comics into their book racks last week. I’ve raided what I could, but the stock wasn’t plentiful and as such, was gone pretty quickly.
Cheap comics always get me.
One of them I nabbed was “Batman Adventures: Masquerade in Red”. It was a delight to read, even if it was written for a younger audience. Styled after the Bruce Timm Animated series, the book looks great. Writer Dan Slott hit a great balance between comedy and action, never letting a good punch up be too far away. The opening pages with Dr Thompkins and Alfred were some of the best comics I’ve read in ages, and any book with the Phantasm in it already has me hooked.
I’m also excited as this book does skew younger that I will have some books for the boy to flip through should his attention ever turn towards the graphic novel.
–Scott is a writer and founder at 9to5. He’s a host on The 9to5 Entertainment System and does a lot of the graphic design around these parts.
Where the heroes of the Big Fish adventure find themselves running around Baldur’s Gate looking for magical children’s toys.
