My son is fifteen, and a freshman in high school. He spent his early years at a small private school, and transitioned to a much larger public high school this year. As such, he’s encountering several aspects of the human existence that he was more or less sheltered from prior to this year. As neither my wife nor I particularly care to fight with him about anything growing from his body, he has a scraggly teenage semi-beard and an absolutely glorious mane of blond hair that reaches the middle of his back.
We have warned him that, given his appearance, it is absolutely inevitable that someone will eventually attempt to buy weed from him. It’s ridiculous to deny it; if I picked him and 20 other white kids from his class and asked a cop which one of these kids is holding? mine would be the first he turned to. He doesn’t dress like a stoner, necessarily, but the rest of the look is there.
Today he went into the bathroom and two kids were passing a vape back and forth. They left when he came in, he took care of business, and then another student came in. That student came in and, no doubt detecting a whiff of the vape on the air, asked him if he wanted to buy “a smoke.” I assume that’s a cigarette; I don’t know if kids call vapes “smokes,” but whatever.
My son’s response? “No thanks. My parents love me.”
My wife and I both reacted in the same way to this story, which was that he was probably lucky he didn’t get popped for it, but he said the kid was chill about it. I did let him know that a simple “no thanks” would probably suffice next time.
I started Pragmataa little under a month ago, and when I did I called it the biggest Dad game since The Last of Us. I beat it tonight, and that opinion remains true; the basic plot of the game is that you end up stranded on the Moon (roll with it) and you end up rapidly adopting, more or less, an android girl who you name Diana. All of the enemies on the moon are robotic in nature (AI GONE WILD is a good-enough description of the wider plot) and Diana helps you throughout your mission by hacking your robot enemies so that you can blow them to pieces with guns. The basic game structure is not quite a Soulslike (die, and you just reappear at the hub) but it’s definitely Soulslike-adjacent; lots of customization of your equipment (no ability scores, though) which gives you a ton of flexibility for how you approach combat throughout the game. Mods can be applied to your suit, all of your guns can be upgraded, Diana’s hacks can be upgraded, and so on. There’s a hub you can return to that acts similar to the bonfires you find in Soulslikes, although it’s more of a hub base than anything else.
This hits right in my sweet spot, honestly; the different zones you can reach are separate and you can’t go in between them without going to the hub in between, but there’s hidden stuff to find everywhere and your inability to travel from zone A directly to zone D doesn’t end up being annoying at all. The exploration is great, and the combat is not like anything I’ve seen before. You’re essentially fighting as two characters as once; Hugh (the guy) controls like any main character in any shooter you’ve ever played, but Diana’s hacks require you to open up a grid and then navigate though it using the face buttons, hitting various nodes that power up the hack as you’re moving through. Successfully completing the hack does damage on its own and also opens the enemy’s armor up, allowing you to do damage with your guns.
I feel like that description’s unclear. Here’s what the hack interface looks like:
It’s important to realize that while time is slowed down, it’s still happening, so you will sometimes have to interrupt your hack to dodge away from an enemy attack, and there are mods that will allow you to start from where you left off if you get interrupted, by losing connection or getting hit. This makes combat really frenetic and super satisfying, especially once you gain the ability to overheat your enemies, which allows you to do critical attacks. And there’s another mod that makes critical attacks also damage nearby enemies, and … man, combat is fun in this game.
The technical aspects are all solid; graphics are pretty stellar and I didn’t encounter any bugs. I’ve talked about this before; so long as I can tell what I’m doing, I don’t really worry about graphics in video games any longer. Diana and Hugh’s animations and facial expressions are great and while the environments are kinda samey (you’re on a moon base, after all) they do manage to work in a forest level via some nanotech-related shenanigans. Certain items have audio cues that help you find them and the game doesn’t actually tell you to listen for the audio cues, which was a nice touch. Voice acting is great– any time a game has a little kid in it (Diana’s not human, but comes off as being eight or so) you could be in some serious trouble with voice acting, but it’s really solid here, even in the more heavy emotional scenes.
And … yeah. About that. The game didn’t make me cry, but it bloody well could have. I’m not spoiling anything; the ending doesn’t exactly come out of nowhere but it still managed to take me by surprise, if only because holy shit, I didn’t think they were really gonna do that.
My tendency toward heavy exploration and trying to find everything led to about a 20-hour play through on this one; you need two of them to platinum the game, which I don’t think I’m going to do, but I might. You could probably get done in 10-12 hours if you weren’t poking your head into every nook and cranny. Definitely check it out.
That absurdly tall, gloriously-haired kid on the right there— who is the same kid as this kid— graduated from 8th grade today. Which means that he is somehow a high school student now. Sooner than you might think, as he’s taking summer school classes right away and they start in a bit over a week.
That fat bastard on the left is going to be fifty in a month. He is somehow still alive.
I am feeling my mortality a bit more than usual this week, if you haven’t figured that out.
And my god have I been writing on this site for a long time.
My son will be attending the same high school that both my wife and I graduated from, and he had an appointment with his counselor tonight to get his freshman schedule set up. I wasn’t really sure if all three of us needed to go, but we all went anyway, and we spent a little bit of time after the meeting wandering around the building.
My head is still kind of swimming. There has been an immense amount of renovation in the — God — thirty-two years since I graduated, which means that fully half of what I remember literally isn’t there anymore and if it’s still there everything around it is different. There were occasional flashes of “Yes, I remember this hallway” or “Yes, I remember this stairwell,” but nothing seemed to connect to anything else the way I remember any more. I’m not even completely sure I went there any longer.
Also, my son is about to be in high school and I graduated from high school thirty-two years ago, and I’ll be over here, in the corner, crumbling into dust for the rest of the night.
That is more literal and less insulting a statement than it might seem. I am about to turn fifty this summer and I spend a positively unhealthy proportion of my income on comic books and Legos. I spend so much money on Legos that I am noticing that the technically-proper singular (it’s “Lego,” not “Legos,” believe it or not) is starting to sneak into my vocabulary; I am not someone who can accuse anyone of being too old for anything they enjoy except under circumstances of the most rank hypocrisy.
No, what I mean is I was born a couple of years too early for Pokémon to be a part of my youth. This is the real dividing line between Gen X and the Millennials, people; if Pokémon was a part of your childhood or late adolescence, or your friends’ childhood or late adolescence, you’re a Millennial. If it wasn’t, you’re either a Gen Xer or a girl, and we all know girls don’t count.
(That was a joke, shut up.)
My son has been into Pokémon since he was three or four. He has absorbed all of this shit entirely on his own, because his mother and I don’t know a damn thing about it. And he has only just now, at the ripe old age of fourteen, decided that he wants to learn how to play the game. And he is putting together a “deck,” which is a thing you use for card games, apparently, and he and I spent two hours at a soon-to-be-going-out-of-business card and game store today searching through thousands and thousands of bulk Pokémon cards in hopes of finding the exact cards he wanted.
We were, all told, more successful than I might have guessed going in. That thing up there, or at least one of them, is a Toxel, and goal #1 was to find a Toxel card. We found a few different ones and he just kept adding goals as we continued to sort through huge boxes of cards; I kept one eye out for the stuff he was looking for (any “dragon” types, any cards in Japanese, just for the hell of it, fairy types, and a half-dozen or so specific Poképeople) and another out for anything with a ridiculous enough name that I wanted to buy it. We were spending $20 for all the cards we could fit into a specific box, and that was hundreds of cards, so I really could grab any card I found momentarily interesting without worrying about whether it was any good or he was going to reject it. He announced that he wants me to play with him; normally my son expressing a wish to spend time with me under any circumstances is a great thing; that said, I’ve managed to avoid getting into CCGs for all this time for a reason– I know how my brain works and these shits can get expensive when you’re not taking advantage of a store closing.
He said something about wanting to learn Magic: The Gathering the other day, too, and I told him he was allowed to play it as soon as he got a job and could buy the cards himself. I will happily give him a car on the day he gets his driver’s license; I draw the line at Magic cards.
The punch line is he’d rather have the cards.
I’m not sure if that makes me a winner as a parent or not.
So what does family time look like when everyone in the house is an introvert?
The boy and I working on Lego sets while my wife works on a puzzle, all of us in the same room, but with minimal conversation happening, because we’re all concentrating.
I’ve been working on the Notre Dame set a few bags at a time for the last several days, but I picked up this AT-AT today and decided to take a break and get this done in one sitting. The Notre Dame set is beautiful, but it’s also crazily repetitive and I didn’t have the strength tonight to make 32 more windows or 10 more flying buttresses. I noticed the instruction manual had a link to the new Lego Builder app, and holy hell, I’m never touching one of the manuals again other than to look through them for the little flavor details they like to sprinkle through them. The app surrounds any new pieces for any particular step with a little glowing aura, making it way harder to miss them than in the manuals, and you can rotate and enlarge the model on the screen.
That’s a Goddamn game-changer right there. Lego manuals are impressively well put together 95% of the time, but sometimes there’s just no way to display a step with one single perfect angle, and letting me zoom and rotate at will was just amazing. Plus they gave me stats at the end, and y’all know how much I like stats. Turns out if you were to stack all of the pieces in that AT-AT on top of one another (I assume the long way, and not actually attaching them to each other?) it would be 6 meters high! I also managed to put together 7 pieces per minute in the hour and fifteen minutes it took me to put the set together. I don’t know what the hell I could possibly do with that information, but I love that I have it.
Sometimes you stay home from work because you feel like hell, which means you have to push your Algebra final back a day. But then your son also has an Algebra final on Wednesday, so you end up having to prepare an 8th grader for an Algebra final anyway.
My son has been patiently working away at the Path of Pain since I got home from work, four hours ago. The person who put the video above together is some sort of divine creature; I never even attempted this feat when I was playing Hollow Knight, and if I had I would have invented twelve new swear words and killed one of the cats by about the halfway mark.
This kid hasn’t let a single swear word or even really a single sound of frustration pass his lips the whole time. No controller tossing. No muttering under his breath. Just persistence and patience.
I don’t know where the hell he got it from. Sure as hell not me.
