Hasta La Gadget!

The plug-and-play TV game Big Buck Hunter Pro ($59.99 list) from Jakks Pacific is rated Teen by the ESRB, but I thought my six-year-old son would enjoy it, since he loves a similar game called Chicken Shoot that he plays on his Nintendo Wii. The game doesn’t come close to being as fun as Chicken Shoot, but that had nothing to do with his age.

Big Buck Hunter is a port of the arcade/bar gaming machine of the same name. This home version includes a rifle and shot sensor that you place above your TV. It requires four double-A and three triple-A batteries, which are not included.

Getting this finicky game to work correctly is a chore. We tried it on two different TVs and had problems with both. With our 42-inch plasma, we had a difficult time getting the shot sensor to stay on top of the thin TV. It kept falling off until we finally got some two sided tape.

I’ve been a remote-control-airplane enthusiast for years. I’ve never really been able to get my six-year-old son into it, though: Planes are difficult to control, and he’s a bit afraid of breaking the machines I’ve spent hours putting together.

When the chance for him to try the new Spin Master Air Hogs Switchblade ($69.99 list) came along, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to get him into the hobby. The Switchblade is part helicopter, part plane. It takes off by rotating like a helicopter, but once it’s up high enough, you hit the Morph button to cause the wings to align–and it then flies like a plane.

Once you remove the Switchblade from its box (which includes, naturally, those annoying wire-ties), resist the urge to throw away the packaging. One part of the Switchblade looks like packaging material, but you’ll need it to assemble the launch base; I had to retrieve it from the trash.

The Smith & Tinker Nanovor Nanoscope ($49.99 list, for kids 7 to 12) is an electronic handheld device that turns the Nanovor online game into a portable experience. In the Nanovor game, kids collect Nanovor characters and have them battle against other players’ Nanovors. The Nanoscope device, about the size of a large MP3 player, lets kids play against their friends (as long as they also have Nanoscopes) without a computer: You simply touch the Nanoscopes together, and you’re on your way to a battle.

Once my six-year-old son and I got the Nanoscopes working, he really enjoyed Nanovor; in fact, I had to ask him to stop playing several times. However, getting the toys up and running was not easy.

First, let me warn you: The packaging says it works with Windows XP. It doesn’t. When updating it, the software wiped out the Nanoscope firmware. We were able to recover the Nanoscope by connecting it to a Vista machine. This seems to be a known issue, as we found mention of it on the company’s Web site.