After much poking and prodding, I finally go my 14-year-old gamer son, Joseph, to cough up his favorite games and picks for your kids’s Christmas list this year. In no particular order, here are his picks.
“I like it because it is all about strategy — micromanagement and macromanagement. You having to be thinking about the big and the small all the time. Startcraft 2 is all about the community. It is one of the biggest e-sport games today. I like to watch it — videos of past matches — as much as I like to play it.”
“Diablo was basically the creator of the ‘hack and slash’ genre. It is great fun to hop into a lobby with 3 of your friends and for an hour you are basically a family — everyone communicates and works as a team.”
“A free-to-play, MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game) shooter with a tug-of-war aspect to it. You are taking and losing factories and facilities all over the map and it can hold up to 2000 people at a time on a map. It is another game where teamwork is essential.”
“A free-to-play – RTS (Real Time Strategy) game where, again, teamwork is essential. You are constantly waiting for other team to mess up so you can take advantage of that. It is a crazy game!”
“One of the world’s greatest sandbox games and as been under development for the past 2 years where you can do anything your heart desires. Single player is fun but it is the multiplayer is where it shines. The great thing about Minecraft is it is so flexible that people can create games within the game that take it to an entirely different level.”
“Possibly the #1 selling game of 2012 and the newest installment of the Call of Duty series. It sends you into near-future warfare and continues the story of Black Ops 1 directly in the campaign. Most of the most energetic and face-paced FPS games and the most balanced Call of Duty since Call of Duty 2. It is also trying to be introduced in the eSports community like Starcraft 2.”
More 2012 Gift Guide Items:
- Do the Work by Steven Pressfield
- Bulb Planting Tools
- Blue Snowball Microphone
- Seagate Backup Plus 500 GB USB 3.0 Portable External Hard Drive
- Logitech C920 HD Web Cam
- We Are All Weird by Seth Godin
- Sunset Western Garden Book – New Edition for 2012
- The Hobbit/The Lord of the Rings
- Garden Mysteries by Anthony Eglin
- The Creative Habit/The Collaborative Habit by Twyla Tharp
- Moleskeine Journals
- Pat Welsh’s Southern California Organic Gardening (3rd Edition): Month by Month
- Podcasting for Dummies/Expert Podcasting Practices for Dummies
- Wacom Bamboo Splash Pen Tablet
- Radical Careering by Sally Hogshead
- The $64 Tomato
- Blue Yeti Microphone
- BioLite CampStove/HomeStove
- Getting Things Done by David Allen
- The Curious Gardener
- Anything You Want by Derek Sivers
- GoPro HD HERO 3
- Flower Confidential by Amy Stewart
- The Starfish and the Spider by Orj Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom
- Microphone Boom Arms
- The Information by James Gleick
- Handy Farm Devices And How To Make Them (1909)
- Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness: The Science, Design, and Engineering of Contagious Ideas
- Apple iPhone 5
- Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity by Hugh MacLeod
- Killer Ratings by Lisa Seidman
- Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It by Karen Solomon
- Zoom Portable Recorders (H1, H2, H2n, H4n)
- Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds