Meet My Kid.

Okay, I’ve been writing this little missive for a while now, and I’ve just realised that even though it’s called ‘With My Kid In America’, it’s never really featured my kid.

So. His name’s Aidan, and he’s just shy of three-and-a-half years old. Cute kid, with huge blue eyes and a cheeky face. The girls at pre-school love him, and so do his teachers, so he’s starting life well. I’ve been a stay-at-home dad in a ‘foreign’ country for all of his life, and let me tell you, it’s much, MUCH harder than I ever imagined it would be. I still count myself lucky though, because I’ve had an opportunity that not many blokes get, and I’m reaping the rewards of such a close relationship already.

Now, I know that’s all sappy, and what you really want to know is – where’s the games talk? Well, naturally, being an ardent gamer and computer fan myself, I’m keen to incorporate it all into his upbringing at some point, but the question is, when to do it, and how much?

Well, he’s already pretty damn good with the PC. He can turn it on, use the Start menu to load up his games, play his games and then shut down the PC when he’s finished. That’s a damn sight more than my thirty-year-old brother can manage. In fact, one day when I hadn’t been watching him properly, I popped my head around the corner to find he’d loaded up Oni (hey, it was cheap) and was running around as some tightly leather-clad anime bint. Good lad.

Start ‘em as you mean to go on. A good tip is to put a big picture of mummy’s tits on the
PC screen and then chuckle indulgently as he salivates.

Sadly, the games he actually plays on the PC are a bit irritating, being based around the kids’ TV shows he knows and loves. You get enough Dora The Explorer, Blue’s Clues and Bob The Builder on the TV without having to supervise a little ‘un playing games featuring these characters too. But, they’re educational and have helped him quite a lot with reading and counting - not to mention computer literacy. So that’s a good thing.

But they’re not proper games, are they? I want him to grow up loving action games, arcade games, games that exist purely for fun. It shouldn’t be difficult, seeing as he takes after his old man in so many other ways. But subtlely integrating them into his life in a balanced way may prove to be difficult. Thank Heavens then, for the recently spawned phenomenon of TV games units.

Some day, Moz hopes, all family outings will be like this.

Have you seen these things? I don’t know how common they are back in Britain, but over here they’re lining shelves in all kinds of stores. They’re retro packs containing copies of games from yesteryear, on all manner of formats. Each one is cleverly designed so that they come packed into an old-style controller, as used on each corresponding system, for maximum retro appeal. And I have to say that, despite their flaws, they’re pretty damn clever little things.

I only own one, currently, although I’ll have to invest in a few more, soon. The paddle controller – based on the old Atari one – contains easy-to-learn classics such as Circus and Breakout. There’s an Atari joystick too, an Activision one, an Intellivision one, and plenty more available or on the way. I was walking around the mall today and someone was demonstrating a controller packed with NES games. I think I’ll be getting that one next, I reckon it’s a must have… er, for a growing boy.

Parents! Keep your kid quiet and out of your hair with this! Note: we
advocate responsible parenting at all times.

The unit I own is called the ‘Namco TV Games Unit’. It’s modelled on an arcade machine, looks quite nice with its big arcade-style stick, and it contains approximations of five classics: Pac-Man, Galaxian, Rally X, Dig Dug and Bosconian. All you do is put in a couple of batteries, plug the leads into the telly, and away you go. Wow! Five arcade machines on your TV!

Well, not quite. To the connoisseur, they come across merely as fairly playable but inaccurate copies of the original games. Those who aren’t so anal regarding their games (or past) may not notice as much, and be perfectly happy. Three-year-olds, however, are blank slates. They don’t care what the originals were like, because this is all new to them. I can stick this piece of kit in my nipper’s mitts and he’s over the moon with it, every single time.

Rally X. Entertaining a whole new generation of gamer, almost twenty-five years later.

I tried him on and off with proper games and at first he was mildly interested, but not overly bothered. Now, however, I’m being harassed frequently...

“Dad, I wanna play the cars game. I need to catch the flags.” Seems like Rally X has gone down quite well, then!

“Dad, I’ve got to eat aaaaaaall the dots.” He’s actually getting to be pretty good at Pac-Man. I’m chuffed. It almost brings a tear to my eye when a ghost deflates Ol’ Pac and Aidan shouts “AWWWWWWWWWW!” in a most disappointed fashion. Me boy’s a gamer!

PAULEMOZ, May 2004.

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*PaulEMoz lives in Americaland with his wife and his kid. So we thought we'd call his regular column: 'With my kid in America' which is a clever play on the old Kim Wilde smash - 'We're the Kids in America - whoo oo'. PaulE is originally from Consett, the town that invented tortilla chips and drunk fat lasses in night-club queues, wearing only mini-skirts and boob-tubes in fucking December, and eating chips out of each other's cleavages so as to earn advancement towards the door. It's grim up North.