HazeAI

I have a 5 year old son and we've played a bunch of games together, here are the most successful:

Child of Light has a second player option that can assist the main character but isn't forced to do a ton of stuff, so he really enjoyed playing as that character sitting in my lap while I read the story to him. We played this one to completion together when he was 4.

Super Paper Mario he played the entire game on his own with me reading the story bits to him as they came up.

We played through Super Mario Galaxy together, he got a lot of the early stars himself and I played it more and more as we got closer to the end of the game.

The Lego games are fun, but he does tend to find them frustrating.

I think Skylanders is probably the most successful one I've found for getting him playing. We are on our third Skylanders game that he has played to completion on his own now (on easy mode). It's also great that it is so easy for me to jump in and out when he needs help or we just want to play together for a while.

At the moment he LOVES 1-2 Switch, I personally am not a fan but he wants to play every night so I try to get into it.

There are bluetooth speakers designed like boomboxes out there. These ones by lasonic are the most retro looking ones, but seem to only be available used at this point:

And these ones by supersonic are pretty readily available, I like this one:

but yeah, supersonic bluetooth boombox or lasonic bluetooth boombox in amazon should give you lots of options.

Edit: Well that formatted super crappy, but hopefully you get the idea

I have always been a big fan of Resident Evil and Silent Hill but have never really had any of the first person horror games like Outlast, PT or Amnesia click with me. Resident Evil was my entry point into the genre, and the first one has always been my favorite. The shift towards more action oriented play with 4-6 has been pretty disappointing for me, so I was excited for the return to horror but wary of the shift to first person. I have loved RE 7 so far.

RE 1 was my favorite previously, largely because the Spencer Mansion was my favorite environment. I've been playing in pretty short chunks with a psvr and the feeling of presence is pretty amazing, but I am still planning a second play through without once I am finished. The lack of a way to peek around corners without vr does seem pretty ridiculous though, that has really been key to my experience. Creeping slowly through the house and sticking my head around every corner has been just the right amount of scary as hell for my tastes, and don't feel like they could have achieved the same effect in third person.

I think it's the designers job to decide what is the best decision for a given game, and I feel like any game I've played that gives both a third and first person perspective is clearly meant to be played one way or the other, and the second option is added as an afterthought.

I've played around with it a bit and really enjoyed developing under the limitations of the system. Even using the in application code editor at 128x128px is kind of fun (for a while at least). I can't speak to the sound editing tools because I haven't used them yet, but I like the sprite editor and map editor, and the API as a whole. Looking at text at 128x128 gets old after a while though. Luckily the files that pico 8 saves are plain text, so you can open them up in your editor of choice and do your code editing there, you just have to be careful when switching between your editor and pico 8 so you pico 8 doesn't overwrite changes you've made in the external editor.

Edit:

Here is what I've made so far, an in progress demake of the DOS game D/Generation. It just has 8 directional movement, and the concept of single screen levels with an exit to take you to the next one at this point.

https://github.com/HazeAI/dgen/blob/master/dgen.p8

I stopped driving to work and started taking public transit specifically so I could play handheld games on transit, it frees up 3 hours a day for me to work through my backlog. I see a ton of other people on the bus/train up here in Portland playing portable games. Actually more often than not it's a psp, gba, or DS lite. I have seen a couple 3DS' though, never a vita.

I'm a Technical Director for animated feature production, I've worked at Laika Entertainment for the past 8 years, on every feature we've put out so far. Basically I write software to help get the movie made. At first it was mostly moving files around converting images, making database entries etc... but I've been able to specialize and focus on supporting the camera, motion control, motion capture, survey, and 3D scanning departments. So my specialty is basically anywhere the practical side and the CG side of our movies start to bump into each other.

Damn, that was fast. I listened to a bit of scoops and the wolf, but just never really got into it. Once the beastcast got started though, it officially supplanted the bombcast as my favorite podcast. Over time I've found myself connecting less and less with the rest of the staff on the site and I felt like Austin really represented my views and was smart and funny as well. I've got a couple more beastcasts with Austin on them to listen to, but I'm pretty sure I'm done here after that.

My little brother's best friend died a few years back, and that was the extent of my experience with death until recently. One of my best few friends from high school died in December, he wasn't managing his diabetes properly and went into a diabetic coma and died in his sleep, we didn't even know he had diabetes, he was 34. My Grandpa died a few weeks later, I was able to go be with him and provide hospice care for him, but we knew that one was coming. He was in his late 80s and had health problems for a long time. 2 weeks ago my Dad died. He went into the hospital a week after my grandpa died, and he was in the ICU on a ventilator for 4 months after before he passed.

I recognize a lot of what I'm feeling from folks in this thread. Feeling numb, pushing away family and friends, spending time alone. I stayed off work for 2 weeks, but I had to go back at some point, bills need to be paid and all that. I'm the sole earner and I have a wife and 2 young kids. Spending time with my kids feels good but then also makes me think of my Dad, which makes me more depressed. I feel bad because I've been so distant with my kids, I can tell my 4 year old is worried about me and trying to take care of me which makes me feel even worse. Playing Doom and Overwatch has helped a lot because I don't think of other stuff at all, none of the highs associated with family time, but none of the lows either.

I quit smoking using an e-cig. I started out at 24mg nicotine (enough that if I puffed on it for the length of time I would smoke a cigarette I would feel ill from the nicotine) and slowly tapered down over time. Every 3 months or so I'd go down a few mg, took me 2 years to get down to 0mg and get off the e-cigs entirely. I tried to quit many times before the successful one with an e-cig and it was by far the easiest time I had (though still, hard as hell). I used it with 0mg for about 6 months after that before quitting entirely because of what has happened to my Dad.

I apologize for any anxiety the below causes you, but please, show it to your Dad. It's too late for my Dad but not for yours yet.

My Dad is 56, same kind of deal as your Dad, smoking since he was a teenager and really started to worry us once he hit late 40s early 50s. 75 days ago he got pneumonia, on top of the emphysema he had been hiding from all of us, as well as a neuro muscular condition that made him very weak that is another rare side effect of smoking. He was sitting out on the front porch smoking when he blacked out because he just wasn't getting enough oxygen. We called an ambulance and he had to have a breathing tube inserted. He was unconscious for 10 days before he was able to wake up again. At this point he's been in the hospital for 75 days and it's looking like they aren't going to be able to wean him off of the ventilator. He's too weak to leave the bed, so he is fully bed ridden and tied to the machine. He is too vent dependent to even be able to speak or eat solid foods. People keep saying if he had quit smoking even a few months before he was admitted it could have made a huge difference. He is medically stable, it doesn't look like he is going to die anytime soon. Now he is stuck with the knowledge that this is all that he has left, it's his fault, and he wishes desperately that he could have quit smoking earlier.

I smoked for 10 years, my wife and I both did, we remember the conversations about how smoking might shave a few years off our lives but they'd be years we didn't want anyways, so fuck it who cares. My Dad's condition is so much worse than anything I could have imagined. It's not just a few years, it's decades of his life that he will lose or have severely reduced quality of life. I feel bad complaining about my side of it, but I know that Dad's often are more concerned about their family than themselves. Seeing him like this every day is awful for myself and my Mom and my Brother, I feel like our whole family was dropped into hell 75 days ago. Every time his condition improves a bit we get our hopes up that maybe we'll be able to get him off the vent, every time it get's worse we are terrified we are going to lose him. Every day I walk into the ICU to see him and try to muster up as much positive energy as I can, but he just gets more anxious and more depressed as time goes on and he doesn't get any better and it's killing me knowing there's nothing I can do to help him. My son loved playing with him, my son is 4.5 years old and he was the one who found my Dad on the front porch unconscious. He asked me the other day if 'andpa was going to die, I just don't know what to say.

Again, I apologize for any anxiety this has caused you, but I hope it might be a wake up call for your Dad. Take care.

EDIT: I did buy e-cigs for my Dad on a couple occasions and he did at least sub out some cigarettes for the e-cig, but kept smoking. As a lot of people are saying it's his decision, there's only so much you can do.