My nephew is two and a half and one of the ways we are bonding is by playing computer games. I have him on a cheap 8BitDo gamepad - which works well, the Steam gamepad I usually use has a USB connector to allow it to be wired, and the thing constantly disconnects with the unpredictable moves from a little guy.
Pac-Man World: Re-PAC has a problem in so much as they want the four ghosts in Pac-Man games to be cute and kawaii or whatever, not murderous spectres of Pac-Man and his Pac-Family. So we see some giant monster that looks like a robotic Pac-Man thing be the real bad guy. It's like when a villain gets too much charisma and they have to come up with an even worse person to be the REAL antagonist. Cobra Kai and such.
The game is OK for him to play - he is not 100% able to navigate a 3D world. He is starting to get the combination of pressing a button to jump and use the thumb control on the left side of the gamepad to move. I am hoping he learns "A" and "B" due to the gamepad, although he also reads entire words to me sometimes, so who knows where his English comprehension is, it's probably really good.
Something I have seen work is when the a little kid has trouble with a section of the game, they give it to an adult, and we do that - there are skeletons in this game and they are easily disposed of. He has asked me to "find more skellys" and I try to do that, bouncing our Pac character around.
The plot of the game! The plot is that the ghosts kidnapped many Pac-Man characters, like Baby Pac-Man, Pac-Man Jr., Professor Pac-Man and "Pac-Mom", who is clearly Ms. Pac-Man, but Namco I guess didn't want to pay the creators a fee SO GODDAMN DESPERATE. HAVE SOME FUCKING DIGNITY. I don't say that part out loud, loudly, to children.
The game itself for an adult is fine, it's one of those that I am sure I could spend 80 hours with, but I am able to figure out what it is doing in the first ten minutes and that would have been it, sitting installed but unplayed on Steam forever, but it gets new life here. I like that he knows who Pac-Man is, any time spent with those characters is a good time.
So the things I like about it:
- There are numbers on the screens and writing, so we'll get to the point where I read it to him.
- It's not really violent. I am ok with him watching cartoon violence, which isn't violence.
- The first check point is waaaaay too far into the game, and then it gives you like four of them. He doesn't care about check point saves, but it is something for my sanity.
- It's not TOO bad getting to the actual game. After about 30 seconds, if a game hasn't started, he will get a little restless, although we get better at that all the time, and he's got an idea that these things need to load.
- You can pretty much play most of the game so far with the "A" and "B" keys, which are jump and "throw a dot at a bad guy", which he likes doing.
We both seem to like this one.
