Hi guys, some of you may remember me from a long running series I did on wrestling video games here on Gamester81.com (check them out, they are awesome lol). Anyways I am now back with a new series where I look at what it’s like to be a parent who has a kid who loves video games. I’ll be focusing on the similarities and differences of the gaming I grew up with, and what my son is growing up with now. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy it. I would love to hear from other parent gamers in the comments section below.
Baku What?????
When I had a kid I was sure I would be the “cool dad”. I love video games, comic books, wrestling and movies just as much now as I did when I was a child. I thought it would be cool as unlike my old man, I would be into the same sort of things my son would be. This was true for a while, and my and son and I enjoyed playing games together such as the Lego series, Skylanders, Spongebob, Mario Kart and a ton more………… and then came something called Bakugan.
I lack the skills to actually describe what Bakugan is, hell I can barely understand what this is all about in my head, let alone putting it into words! It started with the Bakugan toys. My son saw these in the store one day and thought they were cool. They are these ball things that when rolled over, a card will pop open and you are supposed to use the toys along with the cards to play a game………… I do not get it!!!!
He collected quite a few of these and would humor me by playing a simplified version of the game. He also got really into the TV show and then we found out that on the Xbox 360 there was two Bakugan video games. Cool I may not have gotten the TV show or what the hell the toys were about, but video games were my main thing, and I would finally be able to get into this with him.
Or so I thought! The first Bakugan game we got was called Bakugan: Battle Brawlers and it’s just like the toys! My son tried and he tried to teach me how to play Bakugan on the Xbox, but everything he told me was just going straight over my head. I would “play” with him, but I did not have a freaking clue what the hell I was doing. The game looked cool and from what I had seen of the TV show, it looked like it had all the voice actors and followed it pretty well, so for my son who loved Bakugan thought this was amazing!
Then came another game, Bakugan: Defenders Of The Core. Now this was more like it, none of the rolling balls around, dealing with cards that may as well have been written in Japanese for how well I understood them. This game looked like a fighting game where you played as the Bakugan in their “monster form”. I have no idea what the correct term is, so hard core Bakugan fans please do not kill me! Anyways, after he played it on his own for a bit, he asked if I wanted to play.
Holy crap this game is the most complicated fighting game I have ever played!!!! I had no clue what I was doing and it made no sense at all to me. “Attack that tower” my son would say, “use this attack”, “defend that”, “go over there”, “save that” and so on. Most of the things he told me were met with my response of how do I do that? During one particular tough battle it got a bit much for him. He needed me to use one of my characters “abilities”, but “how do I do that” I asked him. “Just press A over there!!!!” I could tell that his patience was wearing thin with my lack of abilities in the way of Bakugan.
Well I was pretty sure I was doing what he told me, but eventually he took the controller from my hands, did what needed to be done and handed it back to me……….. “it’s really not that hard” he said as the controller was put back into my hands. Oh the shame, the embarrassment! It was like a time warp except it was me as a ten year old trying for the 1,000th time to explain to my dad how to select the fire as a weapon in Joe & Mac on the Super Nintendo. I had become……… old! I freaking hate Bakugan!!!!
Thankfully the Bakugan phase has passed in my house and everything is cool again, but it’s always a reminder that no matter how “cool” and “with the times” I may think I am, there will be things these days that kids like which I just will not understand. It’s kind of like that Will Smith song I liked when I was a kid, except now instead of being Will Smith I am the adult that he was rapping about.
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