Tikkabik

Maybe I shouldn't have stuck my nose in, but I was in EBGames last week when I saw a couple of kids pressuring their dad to buy them an Xbox. They were both about my boys' ages -- 10 and 5 respectively. The five year old, especially, was raising a stink.

The kids were trading in their broken PlayStation 2, and wanted to "upgrade" to a preowned Xbox instead. Here's the thing: Of any console on the market, the Xbox has the least suitable games for kids. The video game market has been skewing older for a while now, and the Xbox is the first console that was really targeted specifically to older gamers. A vast number of titles for the console are T or M rated. That is, rated for teens or adults.

Unfortunately, it seems that this is an afterthought in many parents' minds, if it's even a thought at all. A year ago I was at a birthday party for my daughter's schoolmate when I spied an Xbox in the living room. The father of the boy lamented that he hadn't realized what a dearth of kids' games were available for the Xbox when he bought it.

"Want some unsolicited advice?" I asked the father in EBGames. "Stick with the PS2. Don't let them get an Xbox. There just aren't as many games suitable for their age group."

The five year old glowered at me hatefully, but the dad nodded and stuck to his guns. There was an additional impetus to keep the PS2, from his perspective: EBGames offers pretty crappy trade-in values for software, which means the kids wouldn't get too much for their PS2 library. It didn't make much sense to throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak.