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(I'm experimenting on where to put my Artists Links when I have them)

If any of you read Joystiq, then most likely you have read about the various stories over Thanksgiving Weekend of gamers convincing their families to play the console with them, usually ending with very positive results. Well, to test that, I finally managed to convince my parents to sit down and play a round of games with me.

I started it off by creating some Miis for them. Both of them put a bunch of input into both Miis, with a lot of friendly joking around. In the end both of them came out looking fairly nice (except for the color choice, since Nintendo decided to put some really funky shades into the mix) and both parents were (somewhat) satisfied with how it looked.

After both were created, my Mom decided to go one round of bowling with me. Dad started carving up a pineapple while I explained which two buttons she needed to press in order to advance through the menus. Then the game began with a strike by Mom. Her second one wasn't nearly as good though. As she played through the game, she slowly began to pick up some of the basics of the gameplay, and by the end of the 7th frame she was taking down 9 pins and picking up spares fairly consistantly. She ended up with a respectable first time score of 98.

While not very enthusiastic about the game, she still had a smile on her face at the end of the session.

Similarly, after my Mom finished I gave my Dad a try. He chose bowling as well, and after a very quick runthrough of the buttons we began the game. Opening with a strike, my Dad was skeptical about how accurate the game was. He criticized how the game was not real enough since there was no actual weight to the Wiimote. About 4 frames in, he started to pick up the semantics of gameplay better and stopped criticizing the gameplay.

Overall, he did slightly better than my Mom did ending with a score of 133. At the end he had a very similar disposition toward the game as my Mom did. "This is fun, but the real thing is still better."

They do agree, however, that it might be fun to just play as a family whenever we're together.