Welcome back to Games For Dads! It's been a few years now, since my first and only entry. At the time I had kind of assumed that the coming years would be rife with great Nintendo titles for me to enjoy with my son. Since then, my wife and I welcomed a beautiful baby girl into our family (who I look forward to gaming with in the coming years), but I haven't seen nearly as many must-play co-op experiences from Nintendo as I'd expected. There were one or two, to be sure (Yoshi's Woolly World is definitely worth a mention), but between the relatively quiet closing year(s) of the Wii U, and the fairly sparse opening year of the Switch, it's mostly just been titles with pretty lackluster co-op options (if any at all), or Switch ports of stuff I could have covered already on the Wii U (Mario Kart, for instance).

Yoshi aside, (I chose not to cover Mario Kart because my son isn't that big into racing games yet), there's been shockingly little else worth mentioning. Until recently, that is. Last month, Nintendo (and HAL Laboratory) gifted us with what is arguably the best original couch co-op multiplayer game to come to the Switch so far, as well as one of the finest Kirby games ever made.

It should go without saying that Kirby games are always family-friendly. Boys and girls of just about every age seem to adore the little pink puffball. Even with my son having grown a little bit older and more discerning, Kirby: Star Allies was still an instant hit for him. I picked the game up on a Friday and he basically played it for the entire weekend, only stopping to take breaks when he was hungry or his parents asked him to.

​This will be the first entry in what I am going to try to make a semi-regular column. Each one will focus on a current game that I feel is ideal for being played and enjoyed together by parents (dads, in my case) and their kids.

My four-year-old son began to take an interest in video games over the last year. I started playing when I was about the same age, so I was only too happy to encourage his interest. When I was a kid, most of the games that were available were quite a bit less violent than today. As such, the question of what is age-appropriate becomes pretty important. I decided to go out and buy a Wii U since Nintendo is pretty well-known for having family-friendly games, and because most of the ones I owned didn't really fit the bill.

One of the first games I picked up for the new system was Super Mario 3D World (or as my son likes to call it, "Cat Mario"). This turned out to be a great purchase because both of us have found it to be quite enjoyable. The gameplay is the same as it was in Super Mario 3D Land for the 3DS, except that in this installment, there can be multiple players on screen at the same time.