Andy Robertson (@geekdadgamer) is a freelance journalist who runs http://www.gamepeople.co.uk and produces the http://www.youtube.com/familygamertv YouTube channel.

There are many games that work well for aunties and nieces and nephews, and of course, it depends how old you both are, but Skylanders is one experience you shouldn’t miss.

It’s a two player platformer a little like the Lego Videogames, but here you access different characters by collecting a series of toy figures. Simply place your toy on the Portal peripheral that comes with the game, and the character instantly appears in the game. Take it off, and all your progress is automatically saved to the toy.

When you are visiting or taking care of your nieces and nephews, you can bring your toy characters along to play on their game. When they are staying with you, they can bring theirs with them to play on your game. It doesn’t even matter which games consoles you have, as the toys work across Wii/360 and PlayStation 3.

What I really like about Skylanders is that they have worked hard to include well-realized female as well as male characters. Talking to the Skylander’s character designer I-Wie Huang, it was great to hear him talking about how they battled to include girls as well as boys, although they were initially told that boys wouldn’t want to play with girl characters.

A new game will be released this year on October 19: Skylanders Giants. This extends the original concept by adding new characters and double height Giants, while still supporting the toy characters from the first game.

One thing Savvy Aunties should note is that you don’t need to buy all the toy figures to finish the game – that would cost a lot of money. In fact, you can complete the game with just the handful of characters that come with the game starter pack. Additional figures are nice to buy as pocket money presents but should be seen as a nice extra rather than a must-buy.

If you ensure you collect one character in each of the eight element groupings, you will be able to access all the different areas in the game without spending over the odds. There are also plenty of spin-off products. Best so far are a series of Skylanders Story and Sticker books.

However you play it, Skylanders is a novel way to spend time playing with nephews and nieces.

Photo: Pop Culture Geek
Published: September 18, 2012