

The characters, voices, and storytelling are just fantastic. As Sly proceeds through the game and recovers pages from the book, he learns cool new moves. He's trying to recover the book that is his family's legacy, the Thievius Raccoonus, which was stolen by another not-so-honorable gang of thieves called the Klaww Gang.
#Tom and jerry in war of the whiskers ps2 art covers movie
Think about a dashing movie Robin Hood reincarnated as a raccoon, and you're in the right ballpark. Sly Cooper is a sly, charming, and honorable thief. I can't possibly fit them all into one blog post, so this is just the first installment in a series. The reverse happens too: a game might score high because it's great fun for an adult, but it's just too darn hard for a younger child.īut finally, after a few false starts and a lot of trips to my local EB Games, we've found some games that Olivia loves. A game might be great for young kids, but these sites may score it lower than it deserves because it's too simple for their target market. The big game mega-sites like GameSpot and IGN tend to be focused on tweens, teens and twenty-somethings. That took some time, because there really aren't any good sites that look at games specifically from the perspective of kids and parents. When too many of these difficulties add up, the kid spends more time frustrated than engaged, so as I was looking for a game for a six-year-old to play I wanted scaffolding that started at the ground up, moved forward slowly, and really kept the game from getting too hard. Even the "save game" interface that so many games have is tricky kids forget to save or accidentally save over old games.

Again, not so easy for a kid just exploring video games for the first time. Another skill that is often assumed is understanding the in-game physics well enough to be able to jump and land on a target platform. Easy enough for me, but it was a brand-new challenge for Olivia. In today's games that contain immersive 3D landscapes, for example, that means that the game designers often assume you can figure out where inside that world you are and where to go next. The crucially important part, however, is that whatever scaffolding is present usually assumes a basic minimum skill level. Video games will often try to provide scaffolding in the form of an in-game tutorial. Walkers for babies and training wheels on a bike are examples of simple scaffolding. Scaffolding is a term from education which describes the process of helping a student (or in this case, gamer) learn by providing supports which are later removed as experience is gained. To use a technical term, she was brand-new to the world of video games, and most PS2 games were either too challenging in general, or lacked sufficient scaffolding to teach her the skills she needed to play them. Even the simple-seeming cartoony games wound up requiring a lot of visualization, control skills, and just plain gaming experience that she didn't quite have. Jak and Daxter? Better, but it was really easy for her to get lost in the map and not have any idea what to do next. Ratchet & Clank? It's actually pretty hard for a 6-year-old. In fact, RPGs in general were just too involved. Final Fantasy X? Dark Cloud? No way far too complicated. but in the next moment I very quickly realized that most of the games I had were completely wrong for her.Įven after scratching the obvious ones like Grand Theft Auto, Devil May Cry, and Evil Dead, almost all of the games I had were unplayable. First of all, I firmly believe that video games are good for kids so I was very happy that she was excited about playing these games. When Olivia started playing games on my PS2 at the age of 6, I had two thoughts.

A lot of games either have very mature subject matter, or are very complicated and require a lot of skill and coordination and concentration. Go to any store and look around the vast majority of the games created for it are really targeted much more at teenagers and twenty-somethings. The PS2 is not really a gaming system for young children. Then my stepdaughter came into my life, and I started looking at the console in an entirely new way. I originally bought it several years ago to play a few games for myself.

More than 80 million homes have a Playstation 2, and ours is one of them.
