Babysitting

Babysitting on Sunday didn't go overly well.


Cooked up the stir-fry and Minor got a tiny spot of hot cooking oil on the back on his hand; so tiny that he'd forgotten about it ten minutes later. Tried a sauce that I considered mildly spicy, which turned out to be too spicy for the pair of them. Well you've got to try these things, much glugging of drink later and Major had finished most of his and Minor half. As another experiment I found that Minor doesn't like vegetable spring rolls, prawn wontons, and can tolerate prawn toast. Major only tried the toast and declared it "not like prawns". So Minor left hungry and Major a little hungry. Fair dues they didn't complain.

Major sat at the table magazines spread out at the Batman walkthrough (a game he still hasn't got) peppering me with questions about the answers to some of the riddles. Now as mentioned in a comment I'm a holistic person when it comes to routes and that applies to games too. When I'm running through a game I know to duck here, check this, turn left here etc. when I'm not playing the game only some of the set pieces tend to stick in mind. I tried to steer the conversation over to a book I'd lent him with little success; so the conversation was pretty much one-sided.

Minor wanted to play Arkham Horror, but time was against us so I took them through the demo of Brutal Legend with the censorship options on. Major nattered all the way through this about how some of the moves looked like the ones in Batman thus missing out on all the dialogue. Conclusion was that it looked "Okay". Kept it on Gentle difficulty and amusingly had more difficulty with the giant snake/worm thing than I did before; still hate driving games with a joystick controller (except Burnout Paradise).

Then we had a go with Little Big Planet which Minor kept winning much to Major's disgust. Minor would charge ahead up a see-saw for instance and grab all the bubbles while we got left behind as it tipped against us. I also have to take exception at the races that award a 1st, 2nd, 3rd position as either myself or Major ended up being the ones pushing/pulling the vehicle and would inevitably come in last because of it with Minor standing at the very front. Likewise I had all the trigger stickers would slap them on to the correct spot and down would come a load of bubbles right onto Minor's head.

Some fun moments though as I grabbed an up/down bird and Minor grabbed hold of me and Major grabbed hold of him and we all got taken up in a dangle. Likewise on the water wheel that Minor get jumping back across to get all the bubbles, then when we wanted him to come back found he couldn't do it again and ended up dunked in the water.

Also much shouting whenever Minor accidentally pressed the middle PS button and brought up the menu screen, normally when either Major or myself were in the middle of a jump. "It's not me!" he'd cry as the top right of the screen gave us the battery charge level for controller 2 i.e. his controller.

Anyway got so wrapped up in that we didn't even hear their parents get back, good timing as we all ended up dead and I shut everything down.

Shame as I meant to show off Killzone 2 in FullHD as an example of what the PS3 can do when it really tries.