We have now passed that developmental milestone where the kids can out-play the Old Man on the Xbox 360. They each got a new 360 game under the tree last month, and both of them have finished the “Brave” game from start to finish. I know that as children of the Gadget Generation, mastery of a gaming console is practically encoded in their DNA, but it’s still amazing to see how quickly they figured out the Xbox controller and the game mechanics without any prior instruction (and in Lyra’s case, without being able to read the on-screen directions.) This is especially remarkable because our gaming console prior to the Xbox 360 was a Nintendo Wii, which has a controller that’s completely unlike the two-handed/dual-stick multi-button affairs for the Xbox and the PS3.
(I tried a first-person shooter on the console once and couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn from the inside. As a PC gamer, my hands and muscle memory are calibrated for mouse and WASD keys.)
It’s absolutely amazing to see the strides that gaming consoles have made since the days of the Atari 2600. Playing Iron Man or Batman:Arkham Asylum on the Xbox 360 driving a 47” screen with the audio coming from a Bose home theater speaker set would have reduced 12-year-old Marko from 1983 to an incoherently blubbering pile of gamer bliss.
Now I just need to get the kids their own World of Warcraft accounts and teach them tanking and healing, so we can do our own little in-house instance groups on Saturday evenings.
“Now I just need to get the kids their own World of Warcraft accounts and teach them tanking and healing, so we can do our own little in-house instance groups on Saturday evenings.”
I knew this guy who got me to sign up for WoW. Never saw him in Azeroth again…
He’s in Azeroth a lot, but mostly on the weekends. Drop him a note to let him know when the gang usually gets together.
We’ve dragooned him into raiding with us.
Have Thraps add your main to the raiding list, and you’ll get notifications of the right times to get on mumble and heckle him when he takes Thraps’ place as floor inspecter.
Good choice on Arkham Asylum. It and Arkham City are great games, although the latter has some content that’s a bit more “adult,” both in terms of violence and sexuality.
Now I just need to get the kids their own World of Warcraft accounts and teach them tanking and healing, so we can do our own little in-house instance groups on Saturday evenings.
I know families that do this. Some of them are my guild mates.
Make them farm gold for you.
Teach them the joys of Farm Gulag.
I hear you, I don’t even try play any of those “fast games” anymore, basically my reaction time and twitch reflexes are so slow that by the time I’ve figured out what the heck is going on and gotten my fingers to do anything I’m either game-dead or the game has moved on.
I watch kids play the games and it’s like they are on speed. I think Snails feel this way as they watch the world charge around them.
I used to be an avid console gamer, but right around Spyro II or III (can’t rightly remember, getting old, ya know?), I realized that playing in first person point of view made me violently motion sick. Also, games are so fast-paced now that I just can’t keep up. When I tried to play Super Smash Bros. on the Game Cube with my kids when they were little (11 and 9, maybe?), I couldn’t even keep up with them in slo-mo mode. They crushed me. Totally pathetic. Watching Silver the Evil Chao (my oldest) play Pikmin, she was so fast I couldn’t even keep up just watching the action. I had no idea what was going on. No more gaming for me. *sniff*
*sniff, sniff…..SNIIIIIIIIIIF*
I smell ‘power-level’.
I miss my MMO days. Dark Age of Camelot was my drug of choice. WoW stole a vast majority of our ranks when it came out but I was never able to get ‘into’ it. 🙁
The family that raids together, stays together