Family Game Night: Your favorite board games look pretty good in pixels

My 5-year-old son and I are big Family Game Night fans, playing an assortment of famous board games on our console, much to the chagrin of the traditional gamer of the household, who thinks playing a board game on a video game system is buying a Winnebago and only taking it on short trips to the grocery store.

Boggle, Connect Four and Battleship are the games we’ve purchased so far, but others like Scrabble, Yahtzee and Sorry are also available. A few reasons why this is a popular game option in our household:

• Small commitment. Depending on the settings, each game lasts only a few minutes.
  
  
• No hunting for the games in a crowded bedroom closet. *Insert overly dramatic shots of a frustrated family member searching in vain for something in a closet, only to have an avalanche of books and clothes fall on their heads.* Games like Boggle, Battleship, and Connect Four are conveniently stored on your console’s hard drive if you have the XBOX 360 or on a DVD disc if you have a Wii or PS3.
  
  
• Remember how the little plastic missiles would always get lost, one by one, in the board game version of Battleship? This was particularly a problem with the travel-sized Battleship board game, because there was a whole in the game that allowed the game pieces to slip out. Not a problem with the video game version.
  
  
• More adaptability. You can customize the game experience to include different versions of the same game, which gives these classic games new life. For instance, Battleship’s salvo mode allows each player to shoot as many shots as the number of ships he or she has. This speeds up gameplay, enlivening the experience. Add some special Battleship bombs and torpedos, some superpowered chips in Connect Four, and it's not the same old game anymore.
  
  
• Party mode. My son is a bigger fan of this than I am. Party mode is like a game in itself. It creates several minigames of widely varying quality based on the Family Game Night games you have. I wish we had more control over the kinds of minigames we’re given. For instance, there’s a Battleship minigame where you must match the ship layout given. Unless you're 5 years old, this is lame.
  
  
• My Room. The My Room feature allows players to earn new furniture and accessories by playing the game, which they then display in their virtual room. While not revolutionary, it is still neat, although a bit buggy at times. The game has locked up quite a few times here. I’ve learned to wait a few second for it to load completely before advancing through the various knick-knacks.
  
  
• Mr. Potato Head. He adds a bit more life to what could be a screen devoid of anything remotely humanish. Plus, he doesn't have a voice, so he's not like the annoying announcer guy in Fusion Frenzy 2. He does more physical comedy like Harpo Marx, celebrating when you win, falling asleep at various intervals, and looking shocked when something bad happens. And he has a cool bubble jetpack.
  

My one complaint: The Boggle interface is a little troublesome. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to direct the joystick to the right letters, which costs a little time. But it’s not a bit enough distraction to stop me from playing it --- over and over and over.