It seems that button mashing is easier in the old style controllers, rather than using arm motions to achieve the same effect. Is this a lack of wii-muscles? Is it poor design?

We’ve suggested that our older son opt for the wiimote when playing his younger brother, who could use the old style controller. This effectively provides a handicap to even out the two boys, who are about 6 years apart in age.

The camera angles in Dragonball Z – Budokai Tenkaichi 2 – are well done and really do have the feel of being in the cartoon. The fighting effects are rather nice, and it’s captivating the fellas for a surprising amount of game time.

Lesson learned, don’t be ashamed to use the old school controllers on the new Wii!

He offers the following review

“The feature gross out ones can take out their brains, can make bats fly out of its head.  You can pull out its heart (that’s cracked!) and it peal off its hand so you can see its bones. You can draw on it with three different colors so you can creep out your mom.”

They have them at Amazon – just click on his guts in the image below:

He’s actually got 73 characters scattered across 3 accounts and 14 different servers. He could immediately identify all of his, and distinguish his characters from those of his dad, brother or sister. He’s been creating characters since we started playing in November of 2004.

Index of a 6 Year Old’s WoW Characters:

Some kids collect matchbox cars, mine collects characters in an MMO. Nice collection, kid!

My youngest just told me that he only watches football games where Texas is playing because the only players he likes play for UT, the Dallas Cowboys or the Houston Texans.  He’s clearly not been bit by the fantasy football bug, which would disperse his player fan base across the NFL.

He associates playing football with great strength, and is rather impressed with folks that play multiple sports.   He offered words of wisdom for the men that take the field today:

• watch out for rocks that might be on the field.  They would really hurt when you get tackled and are in that dogpile.
• don’t wear your glasses, but put in your circle things [contacts] so you can see.
• don’t wear puffy hair

Now, I showed him a picture of Troy Polamalu, who’s hair is reknown and inspires fan-wigs.  His advice for Troy?  “He may not actually need a helmet – his hair is SO PUFFY that the men will bounce right off.”   We’ll have to see how that tactic influences the Seahawks offense this evening.

Waiting isn’t a good approach, however. So instead, Gamermom is schemeing up a way to get her little one engaged in reading. Approach it from his interests…

Last year, over Spring Break, we found an innovative way to use World of Warcraft to teach him letters and letter combinations. He would sit on a computer behind me logged on as one of our characters. I’d sit on my machine and use the in game page function to send him letters and letter combos.

Our chats looked alot like this:

Huncamunca pages: “A”
Huncamunca pages: “a”
Huncamunca pages: “a”
Huncamunca pages: “E”
Huncamunca pages: “e”
Huncamunca pages: “e”

He would call out the letter I paged with all the excitement that only a 5 year old can.

For a week, we worked through all of the letters and beginning letter combos:

Huncamunca pages: “th”

His teacher called me at work the week following Spring Break. “What did you do with George? His progress is remarkable?”

Well, I explained that we played a computer game together and she responded with “Well, whatever you did, do it every night!”

Yes, my son’s teacher encouraged us to play WoW every night. Lots of arm twisting involved there.

We graduated over the summer to spelling out the name of monsters in the game. The quicker he spelled them out, the faster I’d attack. We died many times, but in the end, he got really good at it.

We aren’t playing WoW currently, and we’ve taken that technique as far as it could go. Now I need something new….got any ideas for how to teach your child to read in games? Stay tuned and I’ll let ya know what we come up with.

1. Find anything fun for your house today?

Collecting and finding objects in Animal Crossing is a fun component of the game. You can purchase items from the store, be given them as gifts, or find them. You can find all sorts things – spaceships, musical instruments,

2. Which dinosuar bones have you found? Did you donate them to the museum?

Find a fossil, mail it off to be checked out, and donate your new found bones to the museum! The museum accepts art, fish, bugs, and bones. Go in game and check out your kid’s contributions to the museum.

3. Have you tried planting anything? Is it true that if you plant a bag of “bells’ (monetary units of the game), it may grow into a money tree?

You can plant trees that bear fruit, and yes, if you plant a bag of ‘bells’ it may just grow into a money tree.

4. You don’t have any cockroaches in the house, do you??

If you don’t play for a while, you’ll find bugs in the house. Ew! More time out of game, and more roaches. Just gross, but you can stomp them and take care of it quickly enough.

5. Did you get a chance to design any clothes? Or an umbrella?

By far my daughter’s single most well loved part of the game. Using a clever litebright/magnadoodle like interface you can create your own designs. Put them on display in the shop and you might see them on other critters in town. She LOVED creating a design that her in game friends wore!

It’s a rich game with fantastic hidden wonders….well worth spending 15 minutes of exploring with your little gamer. You’ll be astonished at how much they know!

Animal Crossing is the single best gift that Dubious Quality blogger Bill Harris gave us (and we are looking forward to the release of Eli 4.0!)

Animal Crossing is the game that has attracted and held the interest of my daughter – stay tuned for a series of articles regarding that!

Animal Crossing is:

$20 at Amazon nowdays

Only available on the Gamecube

Rated E by the ESRB

An intelligent, and terribly cute in a Hello Kitty kind of way, persistant world game. You meet the folks in town, plant trees that bear fruit, find fossils you can send off to the museum, fish, make lovely parasols and dresses, and assemble fantastic collections for your home. It’s full of hidden surprises and clever details. It’s got a sense of time, so if you log in at nite, it’s dark, if you log in the fall, the leaves have changed color. Just brilliantly thought out and well worth it.

Stay tuned for future blogs regarding lessons learned in Animal Crossing, but for the moment, if you can find it on sale at Fry’s or Best Buy, get it!