The Richter Scale^®

Being a gamer, it’s not unusual that both my kids are into video games too - I let them play with all my toys. Many an evening we’ll play together before it’s their bed time. Games we frequently play include Champions of Norrath (both versions) on the PS2, Star Wars Battlefront II (Xbox)(nice to finally be able to have more than two players - up to 4 in a cooperative mode!), Halo 2 (matches), and some various party games on the GameCube and Xbox.

That said, the Xbox 360 launch titles were a major disappointment.

Most of the games were definitely age inappropriate for 8 and 10 year olds, and I draw the line more liberally than some parents - shooting games are fine if they don’t involve modern age humans shooting each other. Games with bad language are also right out as are really bloody gore-filled games. Under those rules, Halo 2 is in, but any version of GTA, Call of Duty, Counter Strike, Quake, is out. So are GUN, Condemned: Criminal Minds, and perhaps Perfect Dark (need to play that more to make the call).

And, as my kids and I are not major sports fanatics, the bevy of Xbox 360 sports games at launch was pretty uninteresting (although I still ended up with all of them).

That pretty much leaves Kameo and King Kong. And neither of those allows for more than 2 players, and in Kameo, the cooperative mode is a reward for achieving levels in single player mode, and not a given right as with most other co-op games I’ve played of late.

Again, Microsoft’s proclamations during the Spring of 2005 at GDC and E3 about the Xbox 360 being a system the whole family will enjoy seem to fall flat, at least for now.

Sure, I’ve looked at the Xbox Live Marketplace and seen I can download a bunch of games, but of course, then I’d have to pay for them, and wait for the tedious downloads ("broadband" on Bonaire means “occasionally faster than a dial-up modem” - huge difference to what “broadband” is in the U.S.). And I didn’t get my Xbox 360 to play effectively 2D games with cute graphics, or slightly improved remakes of games I used to play in the arcades a couple of decades ago.

I’m hoping some game developers out there are working towards filling the multiplayer family gaming vacuum for the Xbox 360.