Cursing your brood with Zelda lore (gamer parent thread)

[Tuxedo]

This is the parent/caregiver/etc thread. Do you play videogames along with younger relatives. Do you avoid it. Which games do you choose and why. What do you both get from the experience. Does your neighbor play Valorant in front of their 4 year old kid. Etc

I should have made this thread earlier. I’ve been showing videogames to my older kid for 2 years now (from 3 to 5 years old) : All 3d Marios, 2d Switch Zeldas, the newest Kirby, the newest Yoshi, Wuppo, Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip, UFO 50, Little Kitty Big City, Natsu-mon, Smushi come home, Pokemon Arceus. Maybe more. About 1 hour per day on the weekends and during the holidays. We’re always looking forward to this time. I’m playing more slowly than usual, asking for his advice and opinions, and smelling the roses. Rediscovering the wonder of a little 3D fish model.

My kid likes peace… But he loves BOSSES, scares, and « a challenge » , so we’re currently going through Hollow Knight. It’s great. He’s learning how to use the map. There’s a lot of fun details to be observed in the animations and backgrounds. The bosses and scares rule. The funko popness of the main character is terrible for us but instantly desirable for kids. He drew him : (note the UI)

+ Massive moss charger

=

Super Mario RPG remaster and Hollow Knight 2 are next on the list

[Tuxedo]

The elephant in the room is that everyone knows screen time is BAD for young children and showing them videogames is irresponsible. Fortunately, this is also overly simplistic. « Screen time » isn’t one homogenous concept. The issue with screens is how they capture a child’s attention and prevent them from developing other skills in that time. They’re not inherently going to destroy a brain, but they’ll prevent that brain from developing, by stealing time. In that sense, leaving a kid on an ipad with youtube kids is nothing like having an active bonding experience with your kid that asks for their active involvement, which can have a lot of positive effects. In short this is all actually GOOD. Your honor

[Brooks]

my nephew played both the last zeldas with his dad
who also just made him a hollow knight costume

i pray for this child

[cylindrome]

i had good times playing through games with a baby brother and letting him try things or make suggestions. sometimes he saw things i didn’t see myself, like that the jungle island elevator in Riven can go up twice, or that spinning blades in Banjo-Tooie could be frozen. he really liked it when i called him a genius.

[eska]

there’s some sick pics of my youngest brother dancing around with a little plywood sword n shield and a green pointed cap somewhere in the family archives

[Tuxedo]

« This turtle isn’t aggressive, let’s not hurt her »

I said this once when playing a videogame.

And now I have to avoid every non-agressive enemy in every game or I get SCOLDED by my kid

The implicit rules are :

• « Enemies » ignoring the player character can’t be hurt
• They can’t be hurt even if they do contact damage and are difficult to avoid
• If I want to hurt something doing contact damage, I have to show proof that they’re tracking the player character (this is not always obvious)
• The rule can be broken if it’s funny

This seems easy but it’s not. Most videogames have nice little guys running around that you murder without thinking about it, it turns out.

The clearest example is Kirby, where nearly everything is a harmless little guy and Kirby is just destroying ecosystems just for one strawberry pie

Though really most videogames I’m playing seem to be guilty of this. The first Hollow Knight boss is just sleeping peacefully in a corner until you wake them up with a blade.

Isn’t it weird how we gamers (pejorative) collectively consider the possibility of collision damage to us, as a justification for murder in retalation so obvious we never even think about it?

[sleepysmiles]

Closest thing i have or want to having kids is being the oldest of 4 siblings, two of whom are a decade younger than me

my kid brothers are all growed up now but they inherited a bunch of game stuff from my and my oldest-younger brother. his lime green Game Boy Color with its nearly pristine copy of Pokemon Red is still in my youngest brother’s possession. (i no longer have my purple GBC because it was beat to shit and the buttons wore out, nor my copy of Pokemon Blue which was faded and also beat to shit and wouldn’t save anymore. you now have all the clues)

My youngest brother ended up getting way into Zelda by way of the Oracle games and Minish Cap i passed down and when we were once in a GameStop i remarked on Dark Souls “oh hey, love that game”. He asked what it was like and i said “sorta like Zelda for adults?” and he immediately used his allowance to buy it. and now he’s played many hours more Soulsbornes than i have lol

also when we were both kids my old-young bro and i used to sit and watch eachother play single-player games and give commentary/suggestions (in addition to playing multiplayer of course though that sometimes led to sibling fights lol). i remember playing through Shadow of the Colossus and he’d help me puzzle through how to take down each one, even suggesting stuff that actually turned out to being right or at least close. i miss that kind of playing games, sitting in my friends streams is kinda how i replicate that

[Tuxedo]

Rating games

HOLLOW KNIGHT

Status: We finished the game + non-Godborne sicko DLC.

This is the first game I’ve shared with my kid that was genuinely challenging. Usually I’m just coasting through, showing the game like some sort of videogame tourist guide. But with HK, I had to stay focused and retry some challenges or bosses multiple times.

I find the appeal of exploration in videogames immediately obvious (the simple joy of running around a big virtual space…), but the appeal of a challenge is a tougher sell. Would my kid care about seeing me struggle 10+ times against Nightmare King Grimm? Who would?

Well I… severely underestimated the childlike need to see difficult bosses, and rank them. This is better than exploration, apparently

This game made me feel like I lived in an ad, high fiving my kid after finally beating Lost Kin… and maybe being a beautiful person with no interiority living in an ad is not so bad…

Final rating (parent) : 5/5

Estimated final rating (kid) : 5/5

Possible interactions with a kid : Choosing where to go next (huge in this genre) and what to buy / equip (not huge)

Edutainment rating : 2/5

• I thought we could learn about types of bugs. But this is not that kind of game
• Also, dialogue is not interesting nor concise enough to make a child read it.
• The game does help learning how to navigate a 2d sideview map. This has 0 real world applications, but can help learn how to navigate other maps. I guess

Final rating : S

ÖOO

Status : Finished

It’s a trimmed down 3 hours puzzle game.

Wow, choosing to play a puzzle game with a kid was a terrible idea. This was too easy for me, too hard for him, all the way through. I gave up on trying to work out the puzzle solutions together pretty fast, and I just played myself without asking for input and vaguely explaining what I was doing. We still had to see the ending. Not the best.

Final rating (parent) : 3/5

Estimated final rating (kid) : 1/5 Cute caterpillar though

Possible interactions with a kid : Painfully struggling to explain every step required to solve a puzzle

Edutainment : 0/5

Final rating : D

Next is Super Mario RPG remake

[Tuxedo]

UNDER THE ISLAND

What if GBA Zelda was more…………. Canadian?

For the few people who haven’t left, this is pretty great. There’s a shocking willingness to make the island a real (fantasy) place instead of a videogame playground, and the pixel art is very strong.

Lots of weird moments that did not need to be there but we were glad there were. It’s fairly non-linear and full of secrets. Extremely cool game for a kid

Final rating (parent) : 4/5

Estimated final rating (kid) : 5/5

Possible interactions with a kid : Choosing where to go, noticing details in pixel art together

Edutainment rating : 1/5

Final rating : A

[eska]

@Tuxedo

he first Hollow Knight boss is just sleeping peacefully in a corner until you wake them up with a blade.

iirc you can kind of just avoid fighting that one by being difficult about sequencing

[Rudie]

KEEP POSTING I MEAN TO RESPOND TO THIS THREAD THEN GOT TIRED/PARENT.

[Tuxedo]

Currently stuck between thinking

« wow the politics of Patapon are so fucked up. This is like Likoud propaganda. I can’t show this to a child »

and

« Patapon is not going to have a political influence on your 5y old, you idiot »

[Tuxedo]

NATSU-MON

Look the newest Boku no Natsuyasumi is wonderful. It has 3d environments and Zelda BOTW climbing. It has hundreds of crayons drawing for every insect fish and story event. There’s a lively village, a story, palpable wistfulness and secrets. It is extremely appropriate for kids. It will make you proud to have picked the best videogame to play with a child

However - seeing a Japanese kid catch insects and explore a village is what an adult wants in a videogame. What a kid (or at least my kid) wants from a videogame is to explore strange places and kill God. Even when they’re 5. Especially when they’re 5. They don’t want to see another kid havin a mundane summer in a real world location

Rating (parent) : 5/5

Estimated rating (kid) : 3/5

Possible interactions with a kid other than choosing where to go : Doing the morning exercises along with the game’s cast

Edutainment rating : 4/5

Final rating : B

Disclaimer : my 5y old kid is a boy, while my 2months old a daughter. I am going to treat them the same say, but the influence of the outside world has an obvious impact on their gender construction out of my control.

My theory is that young boys tend to gravitate more towards videogames, because culture and other boys give them a higher tolerance for pretend violence.

We’ll see in 5 years if things will be any different for my daughter. Will she want to crush goombas and kill god too?

[Rudie]

In contrast my kid is an extremely girly-girl taking after their mother. Around the same age as your kid. They hate peril. I tried to watch an episode of Gummi Bears and Rescue Rangers with them last night and got freaked out and hid for most of it and I had to constantly assure them nothing bad was going to happen. This was fine when they were three and never went outside. Now they are coming up on 6 and going to Elementary School and need to be introduced to conflict and scary stuff in the house because the world is filled with it and at least at home they can process it.

Which is to say they have had multiple breakdowns being confronted with the first goomba in Mario. They played a lot of NES Kirby, but just by inflating and by-passing everything then having a breakdown again when they have to fight an enemy. I failed to keep at explaining if you can’t handle the conflict in level 1 you can’t in the rest of the game. A family friend played with them and just kept taking the controller and then giving it back for the 3 seconds of no-conflict. Probably a better method than mine, I thought.

I’ve been trying to show them games but they get very bored watching and very irritated when they are bad at playing them. So hard to find the balance. Along with getting stressed out and literally bouncing off the walls and running in and out of the room when something is happening.

I hear a lot of parents say “my kids watch me play” and that is not the case for me. Even something like Yoshi’s Wooly World for Wii U which is far too complex for a kid (despite apperances.) in World 2 there was a lava stage and they started screaming and getting scared and begging me to turn it off. So that was the end of that!

[Tuxedo]

Wow our experiences couldn’t be more different!

And I’m sure your kid wouldn’t even like Natsu-mon because they’d realize the inherent violence of bug catching and fishing

The only games we played I could recommend to your family come with caveats, they’re Smushi come home (peaceful 3d platformer, it’s no Mario though and the dark caves can be intimidating) and Little Kitty Big City (another mostly peaceful 3d platformer, the cat can attack birds and bother humans though) and both games can’t possibly be controlled by a 5y old

I’ve also ran into this issue of : either console games are ancient and they’re too difficult (and always violent), or they’re modern and the control scheme is too complex for kids to play naturally. It feels so intuitively obvious why the mobile market surpassed the console market now

[anothergod]

This thread rules. Our baby is four months away and we’re already talking about her gaming. Final Fantasy is gonna be real, real old by then.

[Rudie]

On the flipside they love To A T and Horrible Goose Game.

At a friend’s house they got an hour out of just walking around a friend’s Animal Crossing town, but I could hear the stress creeping in when the inventory got full.

[daphaknee]

@Rudie

Which is to say they have had multiple breakdowns being confronted with the first goomba in Mario.

same, at that age too

[Tuxedo]

SUPER MARIO RPG (remake)

SMRPG is the result of Squaresoft at their peak using Mario before the IP calcified.

It’s wild how many enemies here don’t fit the Mario IP. This is about as coherent as your average bootleg Mario. Have you seen the final boss’ true form? Looks worse than a funko pop. Absolute trash

Isn’t this the first RPG with timed hits? Square was putting any random idea into their games at the time, because they knew they could not fulfill their ambitions of having RPGs take over the world by focusing on the niche pleasure of regular turn based battles.

So we get : timed hits (first RPG with them?) jumping around, tons of minigames (Including one about chasing realistic beetles?) and lots of humor using each character’s ~4 possible emotes to their fullest

All this made for a pretty unpredictable and cool videogame for both of us.

Also, Bowser joins the team (good), party members thank each other when getting healed, and sometimes using an item doesn’t consume the item! Just because the game’s nice.

Combat is dead simple, but it teaches the basics of JRPG combat well enough (= Peach should heal now), so my kid will presumably be able to move on to SaGa Frontier on his own in one year

Rating (parent) : 4/5

Estimated rating (kid) : 5/5

Possible interactions with a kid other than choosing where to go : the level up dances

Edutainment rating : 5/5 I could feel his reading skills improve over the course of the game. There’s nothing a kid will want to read more than Super Mario RPG dialogue.

Final rating : S

[Rudie]

I had kept my eye on it for a while and it possesses a demo, but played Phogs with my kiddo. In Japanese it has the infinitely superior name Inu Inu (Dog Dog.) You play a two headed dog with each analog stick and shoulder buttons. It’s like if Noby Noby Boy was a video game. Its a bit much for a preschooler, but also you can just move around with one dog and the other dog sleeps. Then you solve themed puzzles about Sleepy World, Food World, Beach World.

Outside of the dual stick controls it is very gentle and even if you fall off the world you instantly respawn. If you alternate R1 and L1 the dogs keep barking and it is your jump and float.

Its weird but not creepy. You do go stage to stage by being swallowed by snake things. Neo Rude was scared at first then thought they were cute.

There are no words and no serious violence or peril. Good game for my kid.

Will probably try one of the Moomin games during summer break and have that Full Price 1-hour long Bluey game waiting.