‘I’m envious of them for growing up with games this gorgeous’
Keza MacDonald plays Pokémon Shield
For years, I hoped that my children might develop a love of video games – not just any games, obviously, but specifically the ones I like. Naturally my oldest son only wanted to play ad-infested garbage on his iPad and/or Fifa, and my youngest showed no interest at all. What changed this was Pokémon. Last Christmas I got Let’s Go, Pikachu! out of the cupboard, reasoning that my wee guy might be able to use the simple Pokéball controller that came with it, and Pokémon is now an obsession for both of them. I was delighted. But then we finished Let’s Go, Pikachu!, which was a remake of the Pokémon games of my youth, and they started asking for one of the new ones. I haven’t played Pokémon seriously since about 2003, so I’m a little trepidatious.
They’ve now independently played through Pokémon Shield, which is vaguely set in Britain, if Britain were comprised entirely of castles, villages and London. I have no idea who any of these Pokémon are. One of them is literally a sentient globule of milk with a face. “That’s Milcery, mama,” explains my four-year-old patiently. Evidently he has acquired encyclopaedic knowledge of the thousand Pokémon that have been invented since I was a child. I miss my brief period of omniscience, when I knew more than them about virtual monster pets.
The longer I play with them, though, the more amazed I am by how beautiful and welcoming Pokémon is now. It’s like a living cartoon. The characters and monsters look amazing. Pokémon is still about catching and battling monsters, that much hasn’t changed, but there’s a whole world around it now. I have to admit I’m quite envious of them for growing up with games this gorgeous – but I still maintain that the original 151 Pokémon are the best.
Kirk (7) and Killian (4) play Pokémon Red/Blue
It seemed only fitting that I show my kids what Pokémon looked like when I first played it at 11, on a Game Boy Pocket with about four colours. I was expecting them to be appalled. The character and monster sprites are so tiny and blocky! The music is so bleepy! It’s all so deeply primitive. But to my surprise, they weren’t fazed. My kids know Pokémon, and this is Pokémon. On the title screen, as pixellated pocket monsters fly past, they shout out all their names. Nidoran! Clefairy! PIKACHU – in the original chubby iteration! I’m surprised they can recognise any of them.
“Ooh Mama, make sure you pick Charmander,” said my eldest, when we marched into Professor Oak’s lab to choose our starter Pokémon (I taught him well). “Nooo, Squirtle,” protests the younger. When we reach our first battle, they both start enthusiastically singing along to the 8-bit battle theme and cheering me on. I show them the old Pokédex, the cumbersome PC system that you used to have to use to switch monsters in and out of your team, and they are unfussed: “can we do a gym battle?”
I suppose this goes to show that imagination is a crucial component of any video game. When you’re a child it doesn’t matter how it looks, it’s about how it feels. Millions of kids like me played Pokémon in black and white on two-inch screens. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that nearly 25 years later, it still holds its appeal. Pokémon today might look different – easier to play and more flashily presented – but it’s not all that different underneath.
“The colours are different but the strategy is the same,” says Kirk, when I press him for his thoughts. “I just like Pokémon,” offers the four-year-old. And you’d still play it if it looked like that? “Yes. Also, I’m thirsty.”
‘Unless you were born in the 90s, this game is impossible!’
Rich Pelley plays Mario Kart on the Switch
For this experiment, I’ve borrowed my friends’ kids who I regularly sit for by basically letting them do whatever they want then bribing them with ice cream. It’s half term and the Switch has already hit its parental time limit, so we have to solicit Dad who is working from home in the loft, rationing out the Nintendo and probably stroking a white cat like Blofeld. I’ve seen Mario Kart before, usually at some boring adult lunch do where the kids are clearly having all the fun, but I’ll be blowed if I could get a go in edgeways. I spend the first 30 seconds going backwards because Nintendo have swapped A for accelerate with A for rear view since the SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System). Arlo delights in coming in first and does a little dance as I slope in a pathetic eighth.
Arlo, 9, and Ida, 7, play Mario Kart on the SNES
“This looks ancient,” moans Ida. “It’s so clunky and hard to control,” adds Arlo, as I whizz straight into first place. “This game is so stressful. The map is so slippy. The NPCs are going to lap me!” moans Arlo. I’ve no idea what an NPC is. “I’m voting Arlo. You can do it!” says Ida, encouraging her brother. “Unless you were like born in the 90s, this game is impossible,” concludes Arlo as I pull off my party trick of racing around Rainbow Road at full speed on 150cc without falling of the edge. In the old days, this would have had the girls falling at my feet. Thirty years later, and I don’t even get a wink from Mum. Meh. I miss the 90s.
‘My daughter has inherited my lust for charming yet dark Japanese humour’
Lauren Kaye, 35, plays Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On!
Five minutes into this game, the main character is kicked off an angry horse, trampled on and left for dead. This then kickstarts a weirdly serious adventure where you’re tasked by an angel to become the best dang jockey ever. If you don’t: immediate death. I am so happy that my daughter has inherited my lust for charming, yet somewhat dark, Japanese humour.
Unfortunately for you, your character stinks at racing. So the angel ensures that all you have to do to win the races is … play solitaire, really well. It’s an interesting type of solitaire, though, forcing some intense decisions, all while your poor horse is trying its hardest to keep pace in the derby. This isn’t a game I would choose for myself, because the rules seem to bounce out of my head as quickly as they are introduced. But I am glad Ali has found a game that can challenge her and hopefully one day fulfil her destiny of being smarter than me.
Ali, 8, plays Final Fantasy X
Final Fantasy is a sacred text for our family. It’s the reason I got into working in video games and it’s the glue that cemented my friendship with my future husband. The moment we introduced Final Fantasy to our children felt strangely precious, so I really we wanted to make sure we got it right the first time. I started replaying Final Fantasy X on my Steam Deck recently and I could feel Ali’s stare over my shoulder. After finishing up a random battle, Ali broke the silence and asked the question I’d waited eight years for her to ask: “Mum, can I try?”
Final Fantasy X might seem a bit imposing, but Ali has some experience with turn-based combat from Pokémon, so I took her to an easier area so she could fight some weak enemies. “This is so fun!”, she says. But to seal the deal, Ali has to become invested in the story; that’s what Final Fantasy is about. So we started again from the beginning. And unfortunately, she quickly lost interest when it wasn’t obvious how to progress.
For Ali’s generation, visual and audio cues are constantly showing you where to go and who to speak to in games, so that players don’t get bored. But when I was a kid, trying things out and seeing what happened was part of the fun; I can remember spending an hour running along all of the rooftops in the first area of Kingdom Hearts with no idea what I was supposed to be doing, accomplishing absolutely nothing. Still, my daughter’s first experience with Final Fantasy wasn’t a total bust. I still catch her peeking over my shoulder when I play.
‘It’s pleasing that blasting aliens to bits is still something kids want to do, isn’t it?’
Oli Welsh plays Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart and Pok Pok
Seven-year-old Arthur has experienced a gamer’s awakening in the last few months. It started with the latest Zelda, but was turbocharged by Spider-Man 2. Now that he’s finished that three times, as well as the two previous Spider-Man games, we gently pushed him in the direction of the latest Ratchet & Clank, an all-ages romp by the same studio, Insomniac Games. I jumped into his game and blasted away at some robot space pirates for a bit. The experience was at once incredibly futuristic and quite nostalgic. The furry textures, detailed scenes and dazzling effects are not far off movie-quality, but the upbeat vibe and cheerfully bloodless violence reminded me of the games of my youth, if not my childhood – stuff like Jet Force Gemini on the Nintendo 64. It’s pleasing, in an almost quaint way, that blasting aliens to bits is still something kids want to do, isn’t it? Arthur has selected the “easy” option where you can’t die in combat and I am forced to admit, after 40 painful years, that maybe games are more fun this way.
Ivy, who is four, showed me her favourite iPad game, a wonderful subscription app called Pok Pok, which is great because it makes me look like a very tasteful and responsible curator of her screen time (Let’s not talk about YouTube Kids). But the thing about Pok Pok is that it’s enormous fun, as well as being Montessori-inspired and elegantly graphic-designed to within an inch of its life. There are tons of creative activities. I noodled around with a hilarious dress-up game, and made a portly hipster with handlebar moustache, suspenders, and pink bell-bottoms. I lost a blissful 10 minutes to a sort of free-form city-builder where you lay out intricately detailed little tiles of roads, buildings and rivers to your heart’s content. There’s a functional music sequencer, and an endlessly amusing thing where you twiddle knobs and press buttons to make weird sounds. I wonder at what point you start thinking you need challenges and goals to make digital toys like this fun? For Ivy, that hasn’t happened yet, and I envy her. This is pure play.
Arthur, 7, and Ivy, 4, play Frank the Flea
“It’s really fun,” says Arthur of Frank the Flea, a ZX Spectrum game that my older brother Richard wrote, in Basic, for my 12th birthday. It’s about a flea navigating his way past various beautifully drawn household objects without bumping into them too much. Richard got it reviewed in Crash!, one of the big Spectrum magazines at the time, and sold a few copies off the back of that. Before we loaded this up I tried to get the kids interested in one of my childhood favourites, Alien 8, but we found it almost unplayable. Frank the Flea, on the other hand, is incredibly simple and it grabbed them straight away.
“I liked all the things on the desk, like the lamp and the telephone, and I also liked the character,” says Arthur. “I especially liked the jump, because sometimes it was just a small jump, and the rest of the time it was like a really big jump.”
He was amazed to find out that the game was actually made by his uncle when he was about 15. “That’s really surprising! I think it was even better than Alien 8, the game that I played which was made by a professional game-maker. I only died, like, four times, but in Alien 8 I died like 10 times or something.”
Old games, Arthur concluded, are harder than the latest ones. “But I did like it in Alien 8 where, if you lose your lives, you have to be reprogrammed by being punched by a boxing glove.”
‘I feel sad that a game about drugs, suicidal thoughts and leaked sex videos resonated with my teen’
Dominik Diamond plays Life Is Strange
My first feeling is one of intense sadness. This game takes place in a grim high school setting, one awash with depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, drugs, gun violence, miserable music, date rape drugs and leaked sex videos on social networking. I feel sad that this game resonated with my teen. Maybe teenage life is that depressing now. I hope not. My high school was spent joyously playing rugby, Nintendo Game & Watch, falling in love with Othello and listening to the Jam.
At one point the controller runs out of batteries and I have to search Honor’s room for the one of the billions she’s “borrowed”. I feel like I am in one of the scenes from the game and will find a box containing horrible things I don’t know about her.
The game mechanic is clever: you walk around a level and see “things”, then something happens and you have to rewind time to use the “things” to enable or stop something happening. It’s Lemmings with multiple Chekhov’s guns. But sometimes it’s just tedious: walking around a junkyard finding bottles with the most ironic use of “fast walk” ever. The last level is beyond irritating on a gameplay and plot level, with the kind of timey-wimey dream sequence shenanigans that multiple genre TV shows have killed for me.
When it sticks to telling a story it’s great. This is a tale of depth about love and loss and the sad secrets teenagers keep: the ending is profoundly emotionaland a plot twist halfway uses a track from the peerless Mogwai that is the best mix of music and game I have witnessed. But thank God I went to high school in the 80s and not now.
Honor Belle Diamond, 19, plays Manic Miner
I present my father with one of the most emotional, chilling stories about teenage discovery and the effects of our choices and actions and he gives me … Manic Miner. Thanks! A glitchy thing featuring a guy with a debilitating job. And possibly mental illness although he assures me it’s not that kind of manic.
My dad comes from a generation in which arcades were the best thing since sliced bread. A place where a bunch of pre-pubescent boys and lonely grown men melted at mechanical boxes with less than three controls. How fun.
I was swiftly able to learn the gameplay as around 300 other retro games have the same set up and ideas. To beat the levels, I had to collect special items while jumping on platforms and avoiding obstacles before my oxygen ran out. Once I’ve collected said objects I get sucked into a mysterious and questionable void and transferred to a new level. Seems like a piece of cake, right? Wrong! I quickly learned that this game requires strategic placement methods I normally reserve for applying mascara. After my first couple of goes I found myself getting more and more frustrated because the stiff movement and controls makes it hard for the character to move stealthily. You must plan your jumps precisely or else you die instantly. When I play games, I prefer to have lots of “wiggle room” to leave space for mistakes, and this game simply does not provide that. My Dad would probably say something like “well my generation didn’t get second chances in life”.
