One of the main characters in Super Monkey Ball quickly became known as Stupid the Monkey as I struggled to navigate him in his little bubble away from some weird Boss character with flaming balls shooting from its wrists, or something. The details are vague now. But the point is I tried about 782 times to get Stupid the Monkey off the platform and onto the bridge and the more I tried the angrier I got, and with one child on either side of me I really had to rein in all my rude words.
Having said that, we had much more fun with Supernerd's other choice. This was our children's first real introduction to the Star Wars world. Mars tends to be very frightened of scary elements in movies, so at six years of age he is still far too young to watch the movies, and it goes without saying that Venus also falls into that category.
But with the action reduced down to lego characters running around, building stuff and solving problems, that's something they can really get into. Mars was particularly impressed when Supernerd figured out how to get Chewbacca to rip the arms off a stormtrooper. Somehow the violence becomes a lot less confronting when the destruction of your character is represented by lego bits flying everywhere, which then reassemble a moment later.
Within hours the children were running around the house referring to themselves as Luke and Leia (this version of the game started at Episode 3) brandishing "lightsavers".
More and more their imaginative play turned them into jedi knights, searching every room of the house for R2D2 and affectionately referring to Chewbacca as "Choo choo".
And then one Saturday morning the children were up first and were playing in Venus' bedroom. I got up to get them dressed and as I walked into Venus' room she asked in her most condescending tone "Mummy, you do realise you're in Jabba's palace?"
I replied "I'll be careful."
I waited for Mars to say "You'll be dead!", but I guess we're not up to that yet.
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