Babble

As a boisterous three-year-old, my favorite game in the world was something I coined Cob-a-dee . The game was simple; you take every toy that happens to be nearby, be it stuffed animal or metal police car, and throw it down the basement stairs screaming “COBADEE!” My hazy recollections of this still make me smile and help illustrate a basic truth about childhood: making a mess is awesome. Trashing a room, for its own sake or to carry out some whim of the imagination, is some of the best fun you can have under the age of six, consequences be damned. Elebits is the clean and safe twenty-first-century version of Cob-a-dee.

In the game world, the teensy little critters named Elebits, which power all electronic devices, have escaped. As the child of the two foremost Elebit researchers on the planet, it's your job to round them up, but they're crafty little beasts and tend to hide everywhere. Here's where the game gets fun. Using the Wii's controller like a laser pointer, you can pick up anything you see in your charmingly domestic environment and toss it about, zapping Elebits where you find them. Open a closet and tear everything off the shelves, shaking boxes and smashing vases, or go into your bedroom and topple a shelf, spilling toys and books all over the floor in the process. As the game goes on, your pointer gets more and more powerful, and what you can manipulate grows in tandem. Eventually, you're picking up and tossing around houses, literally trashing the whole neighborhood. Your kid will love making the mess; you'll love not cleaning it up. — John Constantine

Since becoming hooked on Loco Roco, I have learned that there are two types of people: those who just get with it and play, and those who ask, "But how do you win?" This second group is missing the point. In Loco Roco, you are a small yellow blob who bounces through various cartoonish worlds eating fruit, which scores you points and makes you a much bigger yellow blob. That's pretty much it, apart from avoiding "mojas" — little black clouds with angry faces. You bounce, you eat fruit, you find hidden worlds, all to the sweet tunes of happy-happy nonsense pop. If that's not winning, I don't know what is. — Sarah Sundberg

Chances are you've guided a little metal ball through a wooden labyrinth at least once. There's a timeless appeal to those infuriating contraptions; all they require is patience and gross motor function. Mercury Meltdown for the Sony PSP is a software package of 160 digital labyrinths, gussied up in psychedelic colors, a Dr. Seussian science motif, a bizarre jazz soundtrack and a set of obtuse logic puzzles. Hand this game to a puzzle-loving seven-year-old for a long car trip. Once she reaches those vicious advanced puzzles, you'll find out if she knows any four-letter words. — John Constantine

Though Kameo was one of the Xbox 360's launch titles, it's still one of the platform's best games for moderately skilled kids: a smart game that's so versatile even a kid who might normally beat a game in a few hours can enjoy it for dozens of hours. On the surface, it's a standard fantasy game: Princess Kameo is called to save her kingdom by retrieving five magical elements so that a mean-looking green guy doesn't destroy her fairy-filled planet. But the gimmick here is that Kameo must become ten different monsters, summoning their powers at the right moments along the way. She becomes an Yeti-looking dude, a swamp thing, a powerful red dragon, and a dangerous pile of exploding rocks, for starters. The game introduces each monster gradually, so the entire game becomes a process of learning and adapting. Just when you think you've mastered the bad guys by blasting them with fire, the game forces you to become a kind of slimy amoebic blob with elastic tendrils. The game is rated "T" for Teen due to cartoonish violence and the complicated skill-set the game requires, but my ten-year-old test subject (a moderately experienced gamer) mastered and loved it. The game physics are so responsive and creative (especially compared to the endless iterations of sports games) that I began playing it obsessively, and eventually saved the whole fairy kingdom. — Logan Hill