Clumsy Bird and Kitten 2.0

Claire and I are cautiously poking and tugging at Pathfinder, gently tearing little cracks and holes into the surface which is the starter campaign to see what lurks beneath. Claire is tempted to introduce a friend or perhaps family to the whole thing. But seeing as she is a complete neophyte to all things tabletop, I first had to ease her into it, see how she likes it, show her how it all works - she found the concept entirely unappealing at first. Now she suggested a play session with friends via Skype, so that's a bit of a change of heart. Good!

She's playing a Tengu, which means in that particular setting, that she's not an obese Asian man with a long-nosed red mask, but a birdman. Um, lady. Here's an interpretation by the fine artist SketchyMcDrawpants:

And like that bird in the picture, her Tengu is a bit on the sneaky side, aspiring to become a Shadow Dancer. Flying raven ninja people - why didn't they milk that in any modern MMORPG yet? And while she's great at backstabbing, lockpicking, detecting hidden stuff and all those things that make every dungeon group want a rogue (remember when they were just "thieves"?), she'd fail to sneak up on Stevie Wonder with an ear infection. Holy shit.

It's hilarious. Backstab the shit out of a dragon? Been there, done that. Casually figure out ancient Elven rune puzzles whilst walking past them? Piece of cake for this bird. But she's blessed with the grace of a hippo. Which is pregnant. With quintuplets. Scouting ahead to spy on the goblin king and his soldiers to see what they're up to was probably a good idea. Tripping over one's own pants, tearing down an old tapestry in the fall, throwing said tapestry into a lit brazier to set the whole place on fire, then crashing the brazier into a table, which sends a dagger, that had been resting on said table, flying through the air and straight into the goblin king's left eye, however, is generally considered a bad move.

Those goblins could have been our friends. They could have told us how to beat that giant monster at the end of the dungeon. But rushing in to help an inexperienced rogue, who just committed what must have looked like the world's most complicated and embarassing assassination attempt is cool, too. Besides, everyone appreciates a bit of Rube Goldberg. We're gonna have to get ourselves a new printer for those character sheets (writing that shit down by hand or checking on the screen every five minutes is a pain in the ass) and an extra player or two, but man, that whole thing was fucking hilarious. We had fun.

Oh hey, funeral last weekend and all that, a chance to bump into family and... well, I had the chance to spend an interesting day with Kitten Jr. The kid is 11 years old now and lives like any regular 11 year olds, meaning he's got two computers (one of which runs Vista, which he fucking hates - good boy!), a rather respectable collection of retro consoles and just about everything Nintendo you could possibly imagine, a giant Yoshi and a cat, which provides him with a steady supply of decapitated birds.

He spends most of his days hacking his Wii games and old N64 roms. So, if you want to have Mewtwo and Dr. Mario fight Metalsonic in a stage from Paper Mario on Smash Bros. Brawl, he's got you covered. I'm tempted to get a new SD card for our Wii to do the same thing, because some of that shit was pretty fucking amazing. If you're unfamiliar with Project M, check this out:

Just looking at that makes me want to play Smash Bros. We've also played Mario 64 in two player co-op mode. Not that shitty old hack where player two is a black Mario - there's an actual Luigi model in there now. And if you're sick and tired of the same old Mario 64 levels, there's always Super Mario Star Road.

What's really amazing is how my son's school supports all of this. When I was his age, my teachers wouldn't give a shit. "Here's a jigsaw and some wood, go make a puzzle" that's the kind of school projects we had. My son is running a game design project in school. He's in sixth grade and most kids taking part in this course are tenth-graders, so there's that. He's currently experimenting with Mode 7 emulation.

Look, I hate nothing more than annoying parents, who always talk about how oh-so fucking great their kids are, because, let's face it - most kids are fucking stupid. And parents are biased, because of course they fucking are. So lemme just say that I've been sitting in a room with an eleven year old, each of us typing away at a laptop, talking about mode 7, rom extenders, sprite hacks, move sets and how to apply those damn animations to Jigglypuff's skeleton, who is the most annoying and useless addition to Smash Bros., ever.

Solid Snake and Pacman are retarded additions to the whole thing, Twilight Princess is superior to Ocarina in almost every single aspect and Wind Waker is one of the best animal cruelty simulators on the Cube. You get the idea.
So hey, if you happen to bone every once in a while and you're not totally disgusted by the idea of keeping your very own kid as a direct result of all the plowing you do, try to get them into something cool. I always thought kids were into stupid crap like Yugi Oh and One Direction or whatever the fuck is popular at the moment, but if you expose them to video games at an early age, they can grow up to be pretty fun. Look, I'm not the kind of dad who will drag you to the park and throw a frisbee at you, because fuck that shit. But coop some Mario 64 or destroy each other's faces in Mario Kart, Mario Party or Smash Bros.? Damn, I should have looked into growing a child much sooner!

And hey - he's into game design and I'm a writer. I like where this is going. :D

-Cat (Sr.)