Monday, August 14, 2017

Underdog on top - or when a C trumps an A

This post will be simultaneously published on Monday Molly Musings and on the GamingEdus website. This post will also be unique in that my son will co-write it. (His words will be in bold.)

I like video games, but to be honest, I'm not particularly good at them. I play because it's fun and it's an enjoyable activity for the whole family.

This summer, my son bought the Nintendo Switch game console system.
This is a brief overview (by him) of the new hardware:

Well thank you Mother of mine! Yes the Switch has made it into our household with 3 games that broke me, but let's get back to the system. The Nintendo Switch (or Swish Cheese if you want to be funny) is the newest console, with the idea of it having multiple ways to play. The three main ways are: Tabletop/TV Screen, Handheld, and (as I call it) Mini-Screen. The Switch looks similar to the Wii U a previous console by Nintendo, but the side controllers can come off the sides, with also three ways to use them: One, Two or Joycon Grip. With multiple ways to play, you could take it on the go or settle down and play around.

 However one thing I'd like to point out is how gosh dang tiny the little cartridges are! I'm glad I have all these casings for said cartridges or they'd be gone in an hour! Also, sadly the Switch is not backward compatible like the Wii and Wii U. But basking in glorious FPS (frames per second) in Legend of Zelda, or Beautiful Motion Controls in ARMS makes it pretty worth it. Speaking of games...

One of the new games that we purchased for the Switch was Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.
I've played Mario Kart in various forms for ages - but I'm terrible at it. (I think this is somewhat ironic considering that I'm the only one in the family legally able to drive in real life.) Usually when the family plays, the others take the top three spots and I'm in 12th place. (12th is last place.) I don't mind - I'm not very competitive and it's more about the family connection.

I've been improving and I suspect some of the new features (e.g. auto acceleration, smart steering, and a different controller) have helped. For one brief and glorious moment during a four person race, I was in first place! I was squealing as if I had won the race, even thought it was only for about 30 seconds and others quickly overtook my lead. One of the new features on the "joy-con" is a camera and I was able to capture a screen shot of the short but sweet moment when I was on top. (I don't have the proper technology to transfer the image straight to the blog at this time, so I pulled up the image on the Switch from the saved picture files and took a photo of the screen after it was done to share the evidence.) I'm the bottom right quadrant. My son is the top left; my daughter is the bottom left and my husband is the top right.

Proof of my moment in the sun!
I originally titled this post "when a C trumps an A" because earning a mediocre grade in a subject I struggle with tends to mean more to me than getting a superior mark in a subject in which I regularly do well with ease. Same with video game performance and me. I think that it's no big deal for my son to get first place in Mario Kart because he expects that he'll do well - it's not a cause for celebration. I think what makes a bigger impact to him is when he temporarily falls from his throne, because it's not the norm. (I'll let him comment below on whether that's true or not.)

Well I mean yeah, don't get me wrong. Sitting on top in First place is rewarding, but when a small unusual event causes me to fall to another place. It actually kind of frustrates me, I'm used to being first or at least in the top 3. But when I fall under that, I feel like I've become rusty and I'm failing. But that's because I'm so used to being on top, if anything, failing... Is a good thing sometimes!

A few days later, most of the household decided to go see a movie at the local theater. My son and I decided not to attend so instead we chose some mother-son bonding by playing all 48 courses on Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

That was a fun 3 hour gaming session! It was worth it too, so many customization options were unlocked!

I had no expectation of doing well. My son is a video game expert. He has logged countless hours in front of the screen and regularly beats other experienced players. And yet ... on the very first place, not only did I grab first place, I kept it and finished in first!

Peter (Toad) is on the left. Me as Yoshi is on the right
And I wasn't going easy on her! Wow, who would've thought...

The standings after the 2nd race - and I'm on top!
I asked him if he was just being nice to me by letting me win the first match, but he claims that he wasn't. It was a great victory, and believe it or not, it happened a couple more times during our marathon session. Naturally, I went a little camera crazy and took many digital photos - don't let the many pictures fool you. Peter won the majority of the games.

Mushroom Kingdom Circuit - ended in first!
2nd wasn't too bad here.

Dolphin Shoals - just for a brief time in the lead
She has a hard time with the pipe section.

The start of the race for Grumble Volcano
Classic stage, I LAVA it!


On Rainbow Road Game Cube version - it's a hard course!
I don't remember which version this one was for, my bad if it's false info!

In Wario's Gold Mine
Wario's got a lot of structures, is there more to this guy then we know?

Rainbow Road N64 Edition - a scary track!
Sharp turns and Rainbow Thwomps, oh my!

In Ice Ice Outpost
Gotta keep your cool here.

After all 48 races were through, I ended up in 5th place overall, which is fantastic for me. There's no real way to show how much of a triumph this is - even in the game, once you are below 6th place, your character shakes his head in shame and makes sad muttering sounds, even though for me my usual goal is to get higher than 10th place. Quantifying the achievement makes it both easy and unclear. This concept connects to some personal professional learning my friend Jennifer Brown has been doing over the summer - it complicates things but that's the cool thing about learning.



Let me swing it back from schooling back to gaming - and leave the final word to my co-writer:

Gaming is a great learning tool, I mean not in the sense that you can learn how to drive from Mario Kart or be able to kill mutant salmons from Splatoon 2. But these kind of moments have lessons to learn from it. And it mixes learning and enjoyment in small ways, and that makes it all the while. Thank you Mother, for having me on this Monday Molly Musings, and good night.
(It might actually be night when you read this, but whatever.)
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1 comment:

  1. aforgraveAugust 14, 2017 at 8:15 AM

    We are halfway through August, and I am heading into my classroom this morning with two boxes of board games in tow.

    This is the fourth time in the last three years that I will have taken board and word games into my classroom to add to what is already there. It seems like every time I open the cupboard door, I find more!

    Many of these games are ones that we would have played with our kids when they were younger. In the intervening years, they have grown out of them, and so the games are added to the collection in my classroom.

    In a recent conversation with my boys, we were reflecting back on some of the computer games that we played together when they were young.

    The very first game that my eldest and I played together was a wonderful game called Mighty Mike. To this day, we remember the "free dude" and the accompanying sound effect that occurred every time you manage to get an extra life. There's no way we would've made it to the end of the game, and the certificate of achievement, where it not for the fun of earning all those free dudes.

    Following Mighty Mike, we played Nanosaur, Bugdom, and (my favorite) the retro 1960s aliens-abducting-the-farmers Otto Matic. The games were all from Pangaea software, the gaming company out of Texas that focused on the Mac platform. Today you can get the games on the iPad.

    However, was Pangea's caveman racing game, Cro-Mag Rally, where I first tried to keep up with the boys in a split-screen race-track. It was then that realized that, try as I might, I wasn't as good at driving on the track as they were.

    Subsequent Mario type games only confirmed this.

    As Molly and Peter know, it was my boys who turned me onto Minecraft, and although they have moved on to new computer games, I still like to spend my time playing with blocks. At the suggestion of my eldest, I did download Portal at the beginning of the summer, and have managed to poke a few holes towards the finish line in that game. But there's no race, and we haven't played cooperatively yet. We'll see!

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