One day last spring, I think after the Cranbrook lax jam, Cpher and I were having dinner with some friends at Five Guys before heading home. The dinner included a discussion of Skylanders, which Cpher’s friend Sean has, and had been playing, and Cpher did not have, and had been wanting.
Almost 9 months later, Cpher’s acquisition of Skylanders is almost complete. And as a surprise for him a few months back, I bought one of the ones he didn’t have and started trying to learn the game so that I could play along with him.
“The Beam is Supreme!”….each Skylander has their own catchphrase when they are added to the game…..kind of cute but it gets old fast.
Short version of the game: you ‘port’ you character into the game, and he earns levels and rewards and upgrades, and you can ‘port’ him out to other games and ‘port’ other characters in to beat specific challenges.
Playing with Cpher has revealed a few things to me:
1) Play level – I started my game at the hard level, and like to go all the way through and find all of the hidden stuff. Cpher is used to playing at the medium level.\
2) Play strategy – Cpher plays like a banzai warrior of old, straight at the enemies, and either they will die or he will die. Which works ok in the easier levels of the game. Not so much in the hard setting. As we’ve gotten further into the game the ratio of death to life has steadily risen, and finally (finally!) Cpher has had to adjust his strategy to take advantage of some of the characters long range weapons. After I sat back and killed enemies while he cycled through Skylander after Skylander by rushing up and getting wiped out.
3) Levelling Up – Cpher, thinking he was a big help, has led me through these stages at times. I haven’t really said much even though my little character isn’t going to level up if Cpher keeps doing everything. But after Christmas he got a new character and came up and told me ‘Dad, I got this guy way past you in one day” and we had a little talk about why that occurred….
4) Battle mode – Cpher wanted to show off for the family while I was home and wanted me to play battle mode. And not surprisingly, his level 14 dudes destroyed my Level 4 Prism Break. One time, he swapped in this Level 7 sprocket type girl…and I won! That didn’t happen again and I think I lost 11 of the 12 matches.
