Welcome to GamerDad: Gaming with Children. My name is Andrew S. Bub - the GamerDad - and I've been writing about videogames, movies, and children for over 15 years now. After working as a magazine journalist, I switched gears to write about how media violence affects children, educating parents about them, and working closely with magazines, newspapers, major retailers and even politicians. GamerDad is an internationally recognized expert in this field. Games, movies and media are fun, kids and families love them, they aren't going away. So join me in cutting through the hype and lets have a real conversation about the things that matter: Video Games, Violent Media, and their supposed effect on children and families.
Welcome to GamerDad: Gaming with Children. My name is Andrew S. Bub - the GamerDad - and I've been writing about videogames, movies, and children for over 15 years now. After working as a magazine journalist, I switched gears to write about how media violence affects children, educating parents about them, and working closely with magazines, newspapers, major retailers and even politicians. GamerDad is an internationally recognized expert in this field. Games, movies and media are fun, kids and families love them, they aren't going away. So join me in cutting through the hype and lets have a real conversation about the things that matter: Video Games, Violent Media, and their supposed effect on children and families.
Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King (Switch, PC)
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Posted on January 15th, 2018 by
This game starts out with a grandfather telling his two grandkids a story. So they kind of act as narrators in the game. You play as Lily, a new knight recruit. When the king’s evil wizard brother casts a sleeping spell on the king, it’s up to Lily to search for ingredients to a potion to reverse the sleeping spell, and then find and defeat the evil wizard. Blossom Tales looks and plays nearly exactly like a 2-D Zelda title, and it’s available to download on Nintendo Switch and PC (Switch version reviewed here).
Super Mario Cereal
Posted on January 12th, 2018 by
Big news for fans of video games, cereal, and amiibo figures (that describes me pretty well). Super Mario Cereal is out in stores and even has amiibo functionality on the box! Thanks to my family, I was able to get a box of it, so let’s take a look at it in more detail!
School Girl Zombie Hunter (PS4)
Posted on January 10th, 2018 by
Zombies are invading a Japanese girls’ only high school, and it’s up to five teenage girls to fight back and survive. School Girl Zombie Hunter is a downloadable PS4 third person action shooting game with plenty of guns, zombies, and Japanese quirkiness.
Phantom Breaker Battle Grounds Overdrive (Switch, PS4)
Posted on January 8th, 2018 by
Play as one of six chibi anime female archetypes (maid, priestess, schoolgirl) and battle thugs and demons in this retro styled 2-D beat ‘em up. It’s cartoony, silly, mindless, and pretty fun as well. The game is available to download on Switch and PS4, but reviewed on Switch here.
Cary is Looking Forward in 2018
Posted on January 5th, 2018 by
We’re going to do things a little differently this month. Usually at the beginning of January I’ll post my Game of the Year blog, and then I’ll write a blog after that about the games I’m looking forward to in the coming year. But this time we’re going to reverse that and I’m going to do my looking forward blog first. There’s a couple of reasons why I want to do it that way. First, there’s a couple of games that are coming out early this year that I want to put on this list before they’re actually released. And second, I want to wait a bit on my Game of the Year blog so I have time to play a couple of games that came out last year to see if they’ll make my list. So that blog won’t go up until later on in January. Hope nobody minds. Anyway, let’s take a look at some of the games that are coming out next year, at least the ones I know about anyway.
Creeping Terror (3DS)
Posted on January 4th, 2018 by
When I first saw this game, I thought it might’ve been based on the Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie of the same name, but I knew better than that. But this game could’ve been a low budget horror movie anyway. Four teens explore a haunted mansion rumored to have a monster inside. You play as Arisa, a Japanese foreign exchange student in the group. Shortly after arriving, an earthquake causes her to fall through the floor and into a cave under the mansion. Now she must escape the caves and find her friends, all the while avoiding the monster who haunts the place. Creeping Terror is one part survival horror, one part point and click adventure, and one part 2-D Metroid style game, downloadable on the 3DS.
Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle (Switch)
Posted on January 3rd, 2018 by
Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle comes out of nowhere to combine Nintendo’s headline characters and Ubisoft’s Rabbids franchise together into a turn-based squad combat game. Yep, turn-based squad combat. Take Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, or your other favorites and pair them up with crazy-minded rabbit-shaped copies for some squad based combat as you journey though lands to “fix” the mess first created by the rabbids. While not the deepest strategy game, it is a great introduction to the genre and provides a fun romp through a colorful world of characters.
Romancing SaGa 2 Remastered (PS4, Vita, Switch, Xbox One, PC)
Posted on January 3rd, 2018 by
Back when the Super Nintendo was hot, I was a teenager and was big into RPGs, mostly the ones from Squaresoft (now Square Enix). I couldn’t get enough of them. So it killed me when I’d see images of Super Famicom (Japanese SNES) RPGs in Nintendo Power magazine that would never see the light of day over in the US. One of those was the Romancing SaGa series. But now there is a remastered version of Romancing SaGa 2 that you can download on most US home consoles and handhelds (reviewed on PS4 here). So was it worth the wait, or should it have stayed in Japan? Read on to find out!
A Hat in Time (PS4, Xbox One, PC)
Posted on January 2nd, 2018 by
“You don’t see too many 3-D collect-a-thon platformers like you used to,” would be a phrase I would say, but this past year alone we’ve had a bit of a revival in that genre with games like Yooka-Laylee, Poi, and Super Mario Odyssey. And now to round things out, we have A Hat in Time as well, which looks and feels exactly like a 3-D platformer that you’d find on the GameCube. In the game you play as a nameless girl, but we’ll call her Hat Girl. She wears a top hat and cape and flies in her spaceship in hopes to get home. But along the way, her fuel falls out and scatters all over the place. For some reason, her fuel looks like hourglasses and has the power to change time. So now she must visit all sorts of crazy worlds to get her hourglass fuel back. The game is available to download on PS4, Xbox One, and PC, but reviewed on PS4 here.
Winter Movies
Posted on January 1st, 2018 by
Usually at the end of the summer, I’ll have watched enough movies to write a blog about them. And sometimes, that happens in the winter, too. This is one of those winters! So here’s a blog about the movies I’ve seen in the past couple of months. There might be some slight spoilers here and there. Nothing too significant, but you’ve been warned anyway.
