Bill Cosby has shown conclusively that kids say funny things.  But if you’re not convinced, here is further proof..  A few months ago we had some friends over, and they had their kids with them: Julia, going on 3 at the time, and Ethan, about 5 and a half years old.  When the kids got bored (very shortly after they arrived), they began looking for things to do.  Ethan very quickly found our DVD/video game rack.  He started looking through our games, with no regards to alphabetical order.  I suppose the fact that he can barely read at this point makes alphabetizing difficult, and it also makes identifying the game from the binder side nearly impossible.  He was drawn to the robot/cyborg looking character on the cover of the Metroid Prime 2 box, and asked to play that.  I thought the controls for a console first-person-shooter would be a little complicated for a five year old, but we let him try any way (sorry ESRB, I know you rated the game “T for Teen”).  I was surprised when he managed to pull off a screw attack, one of the harder things to do in that game.  He could have just gotten lucky with the timing while mashing the B button repeatedly, but I saw him do it more than once.

He ran around for a while, shooting stuff and turning into the morph ball and back, but he didn’t really know what he was supposed to be doing so he got tired of the game and went back to the rack.  Then I heard him say “Mario Paint Cleaner!”  By which he meant, of course, Super Mario Sunshine, which involves cleaning graffiti off of walls.  This was a game he had played before, but I was nonetheless impressed by this five-year-old’s skillz.  I saw him jump on a tight-rope, then jump off of it and use the hover nozzle in mid-air in order to reach another rope.  Not too shabby for a five-year-old.

Of course, I refuse to play him in Smash Brothers.  I don’t need to risk being humiliated by someone who was still in diapers when I started playing the game.