beating Super Mario Galaxy 2 with kiddo

About a month ago, I blogged about the approach we take to playing video games around here, which is to check out old games from a local library and play them on the Nintendo Wii we liberated from my parents’ basement a couple of years ago. Earlier this week, that approach bore some fruit: After repeated cycles of keeping the game out as long as we could, returning it for a couple of weeks, and then checking it back out, kiddo and I beat Super Mario Galaxy 2—a game several years older than she is for a console that’s been around for nearly as long as her parents have known each other.

I think this is the first time that kiddo has beaten a video game (in a “campaign” sense), which was pretty fun. Upon further reflection, I’m pretty sure it’s the first time I’ve ever beaten a game in the Mario series, so it was kind of fun to chalk up that “achievement” on my own as well. It’s also a great game for parent-kiddo play, in that it’s primarliy a single player game but is specifically designed to allow a second player to take on some small but significant responsibilities along the way. You don’t need a second player to win, but it certainly helps, and it was a way for kiddo to hand over control of Mario to me whenever it got too hard (at her age, this was most of the time) without totally relinquishing her agency and participation in the game.

Once again: libraries are great, playing old games with kiddo is fun, and as much as it would be fun to own a Switch or something new, I don’t see any reason to abandon the current model any time soon.

• macro
• Relationships
• video games
• Nintendo Wii
• Mario
• parenting
• libraries