Every now and then, the fact that I am not the same age as the people that I spend time with is amusing as all heck. The folks older than me know things that I don't or have life experience that lets them see things in a different way, so they will occasionally poke fun of me. We all have a good laugh about it, and life is better all around. However, my favorite moments are the ones that involve kids. It's basically the same scenario as the first one, only I get to play the part of the older person. Heck, it's why I wrote ten parts to the "Little Kids Are Awesome" series.
In this episode, I start with the fact that I once realized that some of the kids for our family friends did not grow up with some of the same video games that I did. I forget how it came up, but somehow or another, the Mild Wife and I realized that the kids of our family friends (also family friends, for the record) had no idea what Street Fighter II was. Now, this is a classic video game. It has spawned a series of very, very profitable video games from the same publisher, and arguably kick-started the entire fighting game genre. Like I said, it's one of those things that people around my age generally remember very fondly.
Well, these kids are growing up now, so they had never experienced the joys of firing their first Hadouken or mastering the Shoryuken (i.e., the Dragon Punch). That's not their fault, that's just what they grew up with. Still, the Mild Wife and I decided that we couldn't very well let their education have such a big gap, so we decided that for Christmas, we would get them an SNES Classic. This would give them the joys of playing lots of the classic games, without having to worry about older adapters or having to find the cartridges.
The gift was a big hit, as far as I can tell. We saw these family friends a few times after that, and the kids would make a point to ask questions about the special moves. I was asked about how to do some of those special moves in the game, so they were most definitely intrigued by the game. At that point, I was quite happy with the purchase, and I figured we had made the world a better place.
Still, they asked these questions on successive events, so at some point, I figured we could short-circuit this process with a link to a website. That game has been out long enough that the button combinations for those moves are hardly secret. Ultimately, I came across a nice pictograph with the move list, so I sent that along to the parents. My favorite part from this whole thing was the email that I got back. It said that there were very "excited pairs of eyes" that couldn't wait to try it out.
I'm telling you, little kids are awesome.
In this episode, I start with the fact that I once realized that some of the kids for our family friends did not grow up with some of the same video games that I did. I forget how it came up, but somehow or another, the Mild Wife and I realized that the kids of our family friends (also family friends, for the record) had no idea what Street Fighter II was. Now, this is a classic video game. It has spawned a series of very, very profitable video games from the same publisher, and arguably kick-started the entire fighting game genre. Like I said, it's one of those things that people around my age generally remember very fondly.
Well, these kids are growing up now, so they had never experienced the joys of firing their first Hadouken or mastering the Shoryuken (i.e., the Dragon Punch). That's not their fault, that's just what they grew up with. Still, the Mild Wife and I decided that we couldn't very well let their education have such a big gap, so we decided that for Christmas, we would get them an SNES Classic. This would give them the joys of playing lots of the classic games, without having to worry about older adapters or having to find the cartridges.
The gift was a big hit, as far as I can tell. We saw these family friends a few times after that, and the kids would make a point to ask questions about the special moves. I was asked about how to do some of those special moves in the game, so they were most definitely intrigued by the game. At that point, I was quite happy with the purchase, and I figured we had made the world a better place.
Still, they asked these questions on successive events, so at some point, I figured we could short-circuit this process with a link to a website. That game has been out long enough that the button combinations for those moves are hardly secret. Ultimately, I came across a nice pictograph with the move list, so I sent that along to the parents. My favorite part from this whole thing was the email that I got back. It said that there were very "excited pairs of eyes" that couldn't wait to try it out.
I'm telling you, little kids are awesome.
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