My daughter takes down zombies like a pro

Josh
Friday
9:52 pm

I’m tired of Mario Kart.

I’m tired of neon colors, happy, puffy characters and falsetto Italian accents. I’m tired of Petz Sports, Petz Sports: Dogs Edition, Dogs: Petz Edition, and Petz: Fluffy Went to Go Live In The Country Edition. I’m tired of Disney Princesses, pixellated chiffon, happy magic and perky fairies. And I needed a change.

You see, the hours between 8 and 9 p.m. are daddy-daughter time in my house. It’s a time to give the wife a break and spend a little QT with the geeklet in training. And lately, she’s been into the Wii.

Which, for me, means playing Mario Galaxy while she mostly watches, or me trying not to school her too badly in Mario Kart.

But I’m a grown-up. Kind of. At any rate, I have certain video game needs that can’t be fulfilled by training a polygon cat to run up and down a track.

So, last week, I suggested to her that we try a new game. And I took the shrink wrap off of Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles.

Family fun.

I’m thinking maybe it was a mistake.

My reason for choosing the game wasn’t completely selfish. Umbrella Chronicles is basically a light gun game — you know, like Duck Hunt. While the creep factor is admittedly higher, it’s a simple control scheme — perfect for a 6 year old. Point and shoot. Shake to reload. Repeat until the undead are undeader. It’s actually hugely entertaining, and a lot more enjoyable than I expected.

It starts out simple enough. Two people shooting a few zombies and a lot of leeches on a moving train. But it gets a lot creepier when you move into a mansion and the zombies start leaping out of dark corners and giant spiders skitter at you. And when you venture into the city, and hordes of remarkably photorealistic zombies (yes, even on the Wii) moan endlessly in your direction.

Mock all you want. When the real apocalypse comes, my daughter will save my hide, while yours is trying to eat mushrooms to grow bigger.

She’s a surprisingly crack shot, but there’s plenty of things I, as a responsible parent, have to make sure I’m setting the record straight on. “Daddy — nurses can be zombies, too?” “Reload, honey!” “Daddy — you get the mayor zombie, I’ll get the factory guy!” “Less talky, more shooty, darlin’.”

The fact that I have added a few house rules maybe doesn’t help. 1) The Big Sound has to be turned on, so you can hear things coming from behind as well as in front. 2) We have to stand up — it makes it more real. And 3) All the lights have to be turned off to get the full experience. At this point, I’m maybe thinking that I don’t have the most sterling reputation as a legal guardian, since I think she’s more nervous about me scaring her than anything the Wii can throw at her.

There are plenty of other real-world ambience enhancers, too. During a particular quiet part of the game, I got a, “Daddy, stop breathing like that.” Except I wasn’t. The raspy, horrific breathing was coming from our allergy-prone dog, asleep behind her.

But I’m worried the world of the game may be crossing over a bit too much. Today at school, she evidently told her classmate that, during a fire drill, it wasn’t real at all. Of course, she continued on that she knew it wasn’t real because if it were real, there would be zombies and the fire alarm actually sounds different, and how she knew all that and wasn’t scared.

So, before we played tonight, I sat her down, and had a long talk with her about how zombies weren’t real, and the game wasn’t real, guns were very dangerous, as were fire and giant spiders and poorly translated voice-overs. In the end, I said, it was no different from any of the other games or movies we’d seen — all made up.

“I know, daddy,” she admonished. “Just like those Gremlins and scary big black monsters from Aliens.”

Maybe next time I’ll let her play with the lights on.