The controller has been hit and miss with Steam. I don’t know where to be begin to debug some of the issues, but honestly, it isn’t really worth it. I’m discovering the games on Steam, even ones I believe are kid-friendly, are crap. I’ll get into that in a bit, but I’m having difficulty finding games that aren’t addicitive, so no good.
So we reach for the past! And as much beef I have with Nintendo, they have always seemed like they were trying to create a safe space for children to game.
With that in mind, and the fact that the N30 pro maps beautifully with the Dolphin emulator. So now I’m thinking of which games Clover, a Mermaid Ninja Witch with strong feelings about injustice and hates guns, might like to play from the games available for Gamecube and Wii.
I’d highly endorse Animal Crossing. Both the Wii and Gamecube versions are great choices, but I think the Gamecube version would be particularly fun as an introduction. Animal Crossing has a lot of asynchronous and synchronous co-op elements if you wanted to play the game with C as well.
Endless Ocean on the Wii might also be a terribly good choice. Im kind of dissapointed it doesn’t have a Switch analogue. Its basically a scuba diving simulator, with gameplay based around photographing aquatic life and sunken treasure. Very open world, very low conflict. High environmental theme. Very zen and relaxing game actually.
Im pretty sure Super Monkeyball on Gamecube would be a good choice. Even if she doesn’t click with the main game, the mini game collection the disk has is big enough to get lost in.
In that vein id also endorse the Kororinpa games on Wii as well.
Maybe hunt down a copy of Another Code R if C wants something more story driven?
Wii Music is all about experimenting with music and musical mini games, but requires motion controls. Im not sure how robust your controller setup with Dolphin is.
Oh and Elebits, which is kinda of a wierd puzzely, sandboxy, eco friendly physics puzzeler, wrapped up in a sing-song voice narrator who is narrating things in a fairy tale fashion. Motion controls required though.
MySims, except it ran terribly on the Wii. Dolphin might improve it though. Its another kid friendly sandboxy game, in the vein of Animal crossing but more mission oriented and some very lightwieght building customization; some of qhich the animal crossing games will get but entirely till later generations.
Chibi Robo gamecube or Wii… Maybe? Ive not played that one myself. Can’t entirely endorse it.
Okay, about Animal Crossing . Clover loves Animal Crossing: New Leaf. I am ambivalent, but C really gets into it! And in the weirdest ways!
The other day e asked me to help clear out eir inventory, and I said to just drop it on the ground. Well, that wasn’t working, because there was not a space available in the town to place anything. There was stuff everywhere! But not trees or rocks. It was like locusts went through and used the raw materials to manufacture various items that would be useful to simple town living, and left them in a perfect grid across the land. Nanomachine cargo-cults!
i LOVED pikmin! i only played it as an adult. but it’s adorable. and you can stop when you finish a level.
i had friends who were super into harvest moon. i never played it but i was super into animal crossing new leaf. and i’m playing the ios game now but it’s just about grinding and collecting things. it is like a sedative. and i played 200 hours of stardew valley and stopped. started my first co-op game with @annietuna but haven’t played beyond one session, haha.
and c has the nerve to comment on my floor! except i guess c knows the difference between reality and animal crossing #self-own
Wii sports had a tennis game I loved. Don’t recall a volleyball game. That might have been in the Wii Sports Resort followup though.
I had a thought about Animal Crossing for the Gamecube possibly relevant to @maiki .
Animal Crossing on the Gamecube contained a NES emulator, and you can acquire as furniture little stand alone NESes that actually run NES roms from game memory. It was discovered relatively recently, that Nintendo had a way for the player to load arbitrary NES roms into the game, from the memory card. Its not clear if this was a developer debug feature left in; or if they had plans to distribute more games via memory card that never saw the light of day.
So if you ever get a hankering to customize animal crossing for C that might be a fun avenue to explore.
I think some good Gamecube and Wii games that are kid friendly are likely anything Mario of course, Kirby anything, Wave Race Blue Storm for Gamecube, F-Zero GX for Gamecube, Animal Crossing as mentioned above, Pikmin games of course, anything Wario related, Custom Robo. Anything Zelda related, anything Bomberman, the Super Monkey Ball games, anything Sonic related. There’s TONS of kid friendly Wii games, and listing them here would probably take a while…
Thanks @trashHeap, @judytuna, and @fuuko! I have a decent list to go through. Looking forward to the summer when kiddo has more capacity to play with me (we pretty much don’t game during school year, since it is so demanding and there are hours of screen time at school already).
I got MP4, but only one controller, so that will be a to do.
@susan and I were reminiscing on how fun it was to play Mario Party DS, where you had to stay within ten feet of everyone (physically) or the game crashed! The newer handhelds had better networking and created vastly less memorable moments.
How weird is that? What does that even mean, as an observation? Be gaming luddites? Networks attract people, and people ruin games?
i brought my pink nintendogs DS to blizzcon in 2005 and played mario kart with strangers who i never saw while waiting to watch pro starcraft matches. it was fucking awesome.
we also sent ds notes to strangers.
nintendo has always been so far ahead of everything.
