Coming Out of the Basement

So, a follow up to this post.  It’s been 7 months.  The kids haved changed their behaviors around, gotten older, etc.  So where are they?

Kayleigh has moved on to Wonder Pets games that are, at the core, click and find games, but also teach color matching, pattern matching, etc.  They went through a phase of about 5 months of wanting to play on the DS (Nintendogs, aka “The Puppy Game” mostly), but they’ve kinda gotten cold on that.  Kayleigh has become less geeky as Max shifts his focus, mostly.  She likes to sit with me or Michelle and watch videos or the like, but she’s not so interested in the computers now.

Max has almost finished Spiderman: Shattered Dimensions (he can’t beat the final boss on his own) all by himself, and is a pretty hardcore Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 player (his only real issue is that he can’t press the X button fast enough to do the mini-events).  He plays Viva Pinata some, but doesn’t seem in to it.  Katamari is a bit out of his realm with the dual sticks, but he’s working on it.  He played about 10 minutes of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood before we said “You know what?  I don’t think that’s a particularly good idea.”

He is the freakin’ king of Plants vs Zombies.  I don’t even get how he finishes some of the stuff he does, but he does.  He hates sunflowers.  He loves bombs.  He plays 180 degrees the opposite of me.  But it works for him.

Both of them, naturally, enjoy the Wii.  They play against each other at ping pong, or sword duels or the like, and like to ride bikes or wakeboard.  Kayleigh doesn’t really get what she’s doing – she likes to wave the remote around like crazy and see what happens.  Max has strategy and plans. 

They also both love to play “Rock n’ Roll game” – aka whatever flavor of Rock Band/Guitar Hero we’re on.  Kayleigh loves to sing, and to hold the guitar.  Max is a guitar player and a drummer, now that we have new drums.  Kayleigh plays the drums, but only occasionally.  The best part is watching both of them do the “one, two, three, four!” to start a song.  Neither of them play with live controllers, but I’m working on getting Max to really play drums on Beginner.

On the downside, Max has already, at 4, reach that point of “Hey, kid, get off the games and go play, okay?”  He has thrown fits because he couldn’t play games.  He’s refused to do things because he wanted to play.  He’s sobbed uncontrollably because he lost at ping pong to Kayleigh’s wild swings (he tends to put far too much english on a ping pong ball and cause it to spin off the table).  I’m already a bit worried about the amount of games he plays.  However, when he isn’t playing them, he’s more than willing to play kid games – running, jumping, giggling, playing with toys and dolls, etc.  So it’s not too bad.

Also, sometimes I’d really like to get in a couple games of something, but he won’t let me play.  :(

On non-video game fronts, Max watched Star Wars for the first time this weekend.  He enjoyed it.  But he *really* enjoyed the realization that all the people on the screen were scattered around our house in various locations.  He found it hilarious that those Chewbacca toys he’s played with had a big fuzzy moving version.  And he was clearly puzzled by the whole storm trooper vs clone trooper thing, but we didn’t get in to that.

I made him watch “I *am* your father” three times.  He didn’t seem as impressed with that part as I’d hoped.  But Yoda was a big hit.  As was the Rancor.

He’s also been fully indoctrinated in to the cult of the super hero.  He likes Deadpool quite a lot, probably because Deadpool is rather silly, and also has two swords and two guns.  He likes to GunKata me a lot.  He also wants to know the names of every superhero, so we can talk about them with the right names.  And right now, he’s on a big Carnage kick.  I bought the UA2 DLC, which added Carnage as a playable character, and Max adores him.  To the point of running around on all fours like a monster.  I’m not sure how to feel about that.

Oldest daughter is totally geeked out, which I’m quite proud of.  Her birthday money and Xmas money (yes, I’m editing this later, sue me) went to buy, among other things, a Halo Reach hoodie, a Yoda backpack (the kind that is a backpack, but looks like it’s Yoda riding on your back), and various other geeky things.  After shopping for all that, she went over to watch Padded Stick fights (Dagorhir in particular) and brought home a parental release.  So there’s that.