MEMBER BLOG

So I wanted to share with anyone who would read this something that happened to me last night that gave me hope for the future generations of the world. But before I begin I would like to preface that with some back story.

My wife and I have been married for nearly 2 years now. We have an 11 year old son from my previous “marriage”. His mother is a fan of platformers, survival horror, JRPG’s and the occasional bad taste video game that you play when no one else is around so that it can remain your dirty little secret. I play RPG’s, shooters, puzzle, JRPG’s and the occasional mmorpg. In essence I likes me a good story. My wife is an FPS freak with a side of minigame. Our son is a collective of all of us. He plays Bioshock, Dead Space, Silent Hill, Final Fantasy, Halo, Mario in his many incarnations and every Legend of Zelda game ever made.

This is not an exaggeration. He has played and beat every console Zelda game available thus far (he’s had Twilight Princess for about a week and is around ¾ done and promises to help me with the hard parts). He is even bugging me to find him a gray box Nintendo and SNES so that he can play the originals on the original system. I played these games when they first came out and I was around the same age as he is and I remember giving up more than once because of how hard these were to me then. I played the newer incarnations with more experience and managed to beat them with giving up but I would sometimes go weeks without picking up a controller in frustration. I mastered these games over the years and he is ripping through them like toilet paper at a slumber party.

(Thinking on this I can remember playing the sit-down Star Wars game while waiting for my mother to finish grocery shopping; playing Pac-man on a table top cabinet machine in the local strip mall’s hallway while she was clothes shopping, Tron while we did laundry and Donkey Kong while she gambled in the lounge area of the local restaurant. I remember the move from pixel to polygon. I remember Assassin’s Creed when it was called Prince of Persia; Uncharted when it was Pitfall, DoA and Tekken when it was Kung Fu, Fallout was Oregon Trail, Resident Evil as Castlevania and Halo: Reach as Wolfenstein 3D. I have played video games since they were just “a passing phase”. I can attest to the fact that I have not grown in to a psychopath or a wanton sexual predator. So the media’s flustercuk of blame is henceforth debunked.)

Anyway, back to my point. We being the awesome parents we are trying to be decide that since he would be spending Christmas with his mother that we would give him one of his presents early so that he can get some quality time with it before he leaves (that and we wanted to see the look on his face when he got it). So we hand him his brand new Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword 25th anniversary bundle with the gold Wii-mote and wait. My wife being the overly sentimental person she is expects to see a freakout like the little kid with the Xbox on youtube. She is disappointed, I on the other hand am blown away. He looks at the game with what I can best describe as grim determination. He has accepted our challenge. He thanks us, gives her a hug and promptly goes to work.

He got the game at 6:00pm and when I went to bed at 10:30 I could still hear the clang swish of Link’s sword. Midnight 30 rolls around and I get up for a drink and still hear Link’s battle cry and the beeping that is the low health indicator. I am annoyed that he’s still up but oh so very proud of that he has gone for 6+ hours without stopping for food, drink or bathroom and is still grumbling about how he was “almost there”.

I have stoked the fire that is Gaming in my son. All is well.