Hilarious, cute, and full of great screencaps
I was late to the Switch party, but I found the best video of the lot! Nintendo’s video guide to parental settings on the Switch is hilarious for a multitude of reasons and also pretty cute. In it Bowser imposes restrictions on poor ole Bowser Jr., while sometimes playing with him.
The king of koopas demonstrates how you can control the settings via an app you download to a smart device with his smart phone featuring a background image of Peach. Nintendo just isn’t hiding it anymore are they? The controls allow one to set time limits which will display a notification when time is up, or for more strict parents the options to “suspend software” to prevent kids from continuing to play for the rest of the day or until they put in a secret PIN. It’s not clear if this shuts the game down entirely or not, but they way they show it and Bowser Jr.’s dejected face it appears as if it the game shuts down and any saved progress would be lost. There’s even a bedtime alarm.
Here’s the scary part: parents can get a report showing “how much time your child spent playing what games” and their favorite games. To avoid awkward discussion of why little Billy has 800 hours in Gal Gun (note there’s no Gal Gun game confirmed for Switch), one can set a restriction on what games can be played by their rating. According to the narrator, “knowing what kind of games your child likes to play can make it easier to talk to them.” Ahem, just WHO is buying the games if you don’t know what they’re playing?
Parents will be able to protect their own little Baby Bowsers from the real horror: the internet. There are options to prevent any social media or in-game communication features so Baby Bowwow isn’t exposed to nasty Boos, which is how this video depicts internet trolls. None of you are Boos right? Again, some clarification would be helpful: can it be restricted to their friends? I understand keeping them from the dark bowels of the internet, but hopefully that doesn’t mean they should be prevented from chatting or using whatever Miiverse equivalent there is with their friends.
This is all in good spirit and a really nice video, but let’s be real for a second: the kids, not the parents, are the ones who are going to know how to operate these settings and apps. Bowser Jr. is the one watching these videos, not Papa Bowser. The most likely use these settings will get is your dick friend setting your console to suspend software after 15 minutes of play.
