This weekend we celebrated my son’s fifth birthday and he and I spent some father-son bonding time with Mario Kart: Double Dash. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, this is a Gamecube title that has been available for a few years. If you have a Wii and you’ve been having trouble tracking down Mario Kart Wii, this could give you a great option for half the price!

Having said that, it plays beautifully on the Wii as well as the original Gamecube and, like many of the Gamecube games, it is capable of displaying at 480p if you have your console connected to an HD television via component cables. Honestly, it looks beautiful and the control is spot on. Yet, what makes this title a real family winner is the two-player options.

My son’s first exposure to this title was at a kiosk while we were at a local GameStop. As with most Mario games, he was drawn to the colorful graphics and humorous sound effects. However, as much as he seemed to enjoy the visuals, he wasn’t quite understanding the racing mechanic itself and when he finally crossed the finish line in eighth place, he seemed discouraged to see that his characters looked sad.

Rather than race head-to-head with him, I chose the 2-player option that allows him to control the second character on my kart. We were able to race as a team against the other characters and while I controlled the vehicle itself, he was in charge of the power-ups. This meant that when we’d pick up a speed boost, he’d ask me when it would help and then press the button. And when we’d pick up a banana peel or other trap/attack device, we’d coordinate on where to use it.

I found this experience far more enjoyable than playing the game against him and I felt that it instilled a sense of cooperation within him while providing a sense of accomplishment when we won the tournament.

Keep in mind that you can play up to four players with this title (4-player split screen or two 2-player teams) on a single machine and it has support for network play using the broadband adapter on the Gamecube. This has some great potential for a family or a small group of kids playing together. I don’t have a problem with competition, but in this case, we enjoyed cooperation and competition together.

I heartily recommend it and as an adult I can say that it’s as much fun for me as it is for my son!

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We mentioned some of our top game suggestions for this year in our last VodCast. We promised that we would follow-up with a longer list for each system to cover a wider range of games. This is the collection of those lists. Not all of these games are brand new, but almost all were released within the year. Please note the ESRB ratings for these games when you’re deciding what would be best for your family and feel free to comment below or chime in on the forums if you have questions about these titles. We’ll gladly get into more detail. (Chris can testify that I would easily talk anyone’s ear off about practically any of them. You should see how much editing he has to do on our videos. Once I get going…um…there I go again.)

Before I get sidetracked again, we present our lists. They are in ESRB rating order (lowest to highest) per system and alphabetical within the rating group. Enjoy!

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Nintendo of America set a new record last week according to this article at gameindustry.biz. During the Thanksgiving week (including Black Friday) over 653,000 Nintendo DS systems were sold and 350,000 Wiis flew off the shelves as well. This is over one million game systems by one company in a single week! In this related article on their site, gameindustry.biz noted that more than 310,000 Xbox 360s and roughly 150,000 PlayStation 3s were sold during this same time period.

What makes this information valuable to us as parents is that getting a new game system for the family this holiday season is now difficult and it’s only going to get worse. This is usually the case during a launch year, but the 360 launched two years ago, the DS lite came out in June of 2006, and the Wii and PS3 came out for last year’s holiday season. The release of the Xbox 360 Elite and the new price slashes on the PS3 have kept interest high on these systems. However, Nintendo has really regained their dominant position in the gaming world with the DS and the Wii.

Since the introduction of the original GameBoy, Nintendo has always had the most successful handheld platform on the planet. The introduction of the GameBoy Color and GameBoy Advance continued that trend. But the DS has tapped into a market similar to the Wii where people are interested in alternative ways of interfacing with the technology. Further proof of their success with this approach is confirmed by the fact that retailers have found it difficult to keep the Wii in stock ever since its launch.

I’m personally delighted to see such interest in these systems, but I can only hope that parents are approaching these purchases reflectively and plan to use these as gifts for the family that can inspire opportunities to bond and relate on yet another level.

Keep an eye here for our upcoming vodcast and our follow-up articles offering our gaming recommendations for this year!

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