[Podcast] Gaming With the Moms #11: Let Me Rub Your Face

Welcome to Gaming With The Moms, the podcast about gaming with families! Host and Managing Editor of Pixelkin Nicole Tanner takes us through the gaming news of the week. She is joined by Pixelkin staff Simone de Rochefort and Courtney Holmes (filling in for Linda Breneman), and Jenna Hoffstein, creator of the awesome math game The Counting Kingdom. Check out the interview we published with Jenna last February.

Download this episode here.

Jenna was joining us over the phone, so her audio might sound a little scratchy. Bear with us—she says some great stuff!

News & Idle Gossip

• Nicole took her daughter Ana to the movies for the first time ever! They watched Inside Out, and Nicole had to hide her tears so that Ana wouldn’t get scared. We talk about how often our moms cried while we were growing up. (They cried a lot.)
• The well-composed Reggie Fils-Aimé said in an interview that Nintendo was committed to creating good games above all else. Amiibos won’t distract them, they promise.
• Jar Jar Binks is going to be in Disney Infinity 3.0! But you can’t play as him. Apparently kids like Jar Jar, because parents aren’t doing their jobs correctly. Come on, parents.
• Star Wars: Battlefront is looking pretty intense for a T for Teen game. We compared it with the new Batman game (which is rated M) and the latest Lord of the Rings game, Shadow of Mordor (also rated M). Jenna observed that the recent Batman movies were much darker than the Star Wars movies.
• Fire Emblem: Fates will include same-sex marriage! But it’s got some…issues… Incest, for one. Also face rubbing? We’ll know more once the game is released in the U.S. in 2016.
• Tearaway: Unfolded will have a companion app! Players can use their smartphone or tablet to take photos and draw. We realize that the Wii U would be the perfect platform for Tearaway.

• Elmer the Patchwork Elephant is weird. Nicole explains.
• Jenna talks to us about The Counting Kingdom, her awesome educational game for ages 6–10. So many kids (and adults) have anxiety about math. Jenna hopes to change the way we teach it so that kids can get excited about what they’re learning. Read Simone’s review of The Counting Kingdom.
• Jenna recommends Twelve a Dozen, a clever app that combines puzzle-platforming and math.
• We reminisce about education games that are no longer with us, including Oregon Trail, Carmen San Diego, Treasure Mountain, and Jump Start Fourth Grade. Courtney is super excited to get her copy of the upcoming re-release of The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis.
• Jenna is going to start working on a new game in a couple of months, but details are still top secret. SHH!

The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, AKA best game ever made

What We’re Playing

• Jenna has been playing Pikmin 3, a fun (and stressful) strategy game for Nintendo Wii U. She’s also playing Splatoon (a Pixelkin favorite) and Affordable Space Adventures, a fantastic co-op game featured in this recent Pixelkin article.
• Simone, Nicole, and Courtney cannot stop playing Fallout Shelter, a mobile game in which you take care of a colony of humans after a nuclear apocalypse. It’s rated 12+ on the Apple App Store. Simone is confused about how to emphasize the syllables in Fall-Out-Shel-Ter.

• Simone is playing Tales from the Borderlands, an M-rated story game about a bunch of misfits making their way in the world. It’s laugh-out-loud funny. Episode 3 just came out this week.
• Courtney is playing Angry Birds Fight, which is a lot more like Pokémon Shuffle or Bejeweled than it is like other Angry Birds games.
• Nicole is playing The Wolf Among Us, which she loves so much that she wants to go check out the comic book. We talk about how hard it is to be mean in games that give you the option to be either mean or nice.
• Nicole is (of course) also playing Hearthstone. Earnin’ gold and gettin’ packs. She gets technical for a little while.
• Speaking of which, Mathilda wrote to us from Sweden about Hearthstone! Tack så mycket for the email! (Courtney tries to speak Swedish and messes up a little.)

This podcast was recorded in the studios of the Jack Straw Cultural Center in Seattle. The music is by Pat Goodwin at Novelty Shop Creative. Nicole Tanner, Courtney Holmes, Simone de Rochefort, and Jenna Hoffstein participated in this podcast. Thanks for listening! If you liked this episode, you can find all the Gaming With the Moms podcasts HERE, or…