Gamer moms and dads, unite!

So the only thing my sister wanted for Christmas is a Wii. She's 32, by the way. She's married and has three kids, but that's the only thing she wants, as a present for the entire family. So my mom bought the Wii, and I bought another controller to go with it- after all, it makes packaging a lot easier than buying gifts for five people.

My sister grew up in the age of the NES (That's the Nintendo Entertainment System, for the lesser educated out there) and her Wii is coming prepackaged with New Super Mario Bros- the awesome platformer released by Nintendo earlier this year. It was then that I realized that gamers who grew up in the 80s and 90s are now having their own families and watching a new age of kids experience video games- even moreso than the parents. So how can companies still produce crap games?

Sure, we know that Barbie, Transformers, every cartoon movie, and whatever other cartoons kids watch nowadays are going to convert their popularity into video game form. But is it still okay for those companies to produce terrible games, especially when we as present and future gamer parents know how bad some of these games are? Well, I used to think it was a ripoff, but actually, it's probably okay.

Using emulators to play some of the games that I grew up with showed me how different I perceive those games now. Most of them weren't too bad, but they were pretty repetitive. But then again, the things I look for in a game now aren't the things I looked for then. Graphics, gameplay, and control scheme aren't exactly factors that a ten year old looks for- if the box art is awesome, then we'll get our parents to pony up fifty bucks to buy the game, regardless of how bad it might be- and we played those games until the cartridges were worn out.

Writing this post reminds me of the difference in the way parents and children perceive other things like toys, movies, and even breakfast cereal. Parents make choices based on sensibility, while kids make their choices based on the way the box looks or by what they've seen on TV. Even if parents think they know what's best, that choice is usually wrong in the child's eyes because, after all, parents are uncool. Will Smith, Brad Pitt, and Morgan Freeman are three of the coolest parents around, and their kids will probably think they're uncool.

Parents tend to look at prices and overall advantages of buying things, and that usually ends in them not buying everything their kids want. If I'm not a super-rich parent, I'm sure that will be my line of thinking too. I will say this though; I admit to being a 12 year old in a 23 year old's body, and If I ever have kids and they beg for some video game, I'm sure my sensibilities will fade, and all I'll see is the really really cool box it comes in.