A Good Idea For Multiplayer Video Games

Drew wrote in this week’s Funbag about getting waxed by his own dang kid in FIFA 19. In our staff chatroom, I mentioned that the one time my own young son succeeded in beating me in Street Fighter II on the SNES Classic (after roughly 200 tries), I had to ruthlessly blank him in two straight rematches to reassert my, uh, leadership. This prompted Drew to reveal that he has actually never defeated his son in FIFA.

That’s horrifying! It’s an affront to the natural order of things. If the children are smoking their own parents with impunity in multiplayer video games, who even can claim the mantle of Lord of the Family? How can I even tell my kids to clean up their dang socks if they know they can shred me mercilessly in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate with no comeuppance? It can’t be like this.

My proposal is this: For every video game console, there should be a secret code you can punch in on the controller, at any time, with no on-screen prompt or indication, that puts that controller into Dad Mode and makes your team or fighter or whatever insanely overpowered. In FIFA, it would change the button for shooting into the button for scoring, no matter where you are on the pitch. In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate it would change it up so that there was one button that automatically launched a 65-hit fight-ending combination and also switched all the buttons off for the duration of the combo, so that you could wiggle your fingers over the controller and make it look like you were doing crazy complex shit while on the screen your character just fuckin’ whaled away on your damn kid’s guy for like three straight minutes and then punched him over the horizon.

This way, as a loving father, you would always have the option of choosing to lose to your kids, out of mercy and/or a benevolent desire to make them feel like their efforts at improvement have yielded some reward. But you would also always have the option of letting them get out ahead and feel good about themselves for a while, and then popping off five completely impossible goals in the final 45 seconds of the match, snatching the sweet victory out of their hands and making them believe that you possess unfathomable video-game skills that they will never ever surpass no matter how hard they try. Then, as the victor, you can give them the speech about how winning actually isn’t important and what matters is that you’re having fun and doing something together as a family.

This is a perfect idea. The code will have to be very simple. Like A-B-A-B-A-B-A-B-A-B-A-B-A-B-A-B or something. Controllers have too many buttons now.