How bad are the QTEs in Umbrella Chronicles, exactly? Will they lose you more than a few minutes of gameplay time if you fail them? If they're on Easy, should they be easy to react to?

He enjoys WATCHING Zelda, but he's never played one for himself. My brother already owns Twilight Princess, though, so giving it to my father is kind of redundant.

"He used to be a "core" gamer...

...only has very few minutes on the average day where he can chill out and play a game.

...He's gotten more easily frustrated as time has gone on, so a "super hardcore omg" game is not the order of the day here.

He likes swordplay, guns, and explosions. He does not like "boring" games. He likes games that are "cool"...

My brother owns..a Wii."

Going by these criteria, have you considered Sin and Punishment 64? It's fairly forgiving on the lower difficulty, although it ramps up considerably from there. It also meets the other criteria to a T. The graphics are a bit dated, but the last time he gamed was on the 64 anyways...

I'll see if anything else comes to mind.

I don't remember if difficulty actually effects the QTE's, but they're you standard annoying do it right then crap. Typically if you fail they have enough grace to restart the game wait where you failed the QTE.

How's he feel about GTA style games? I was thinking Bully might be a funny choice for him.

The QTEs are the same difficulty on Easy as on Hard. Some "only" cause damage, while others kill you outright. You'll rarely lose more than one or two minutes if you fail, but you only have so many lives, so you may have to restart the whole thing. There's about one per stage, with a few not having any. But most bosses often mix in a QTE to dodge their attacks.

The QTE's suck ass. There's this one where a truck is running right at you, and if you don't press the right button in the split second you have, it's an instant kill and you go back to the czechpoint from about 40 seconds earlier. It killed my wife repeatedly until she gave up. If your dad can pass a couple lame QTEs, the game is great, but otherwise it's a complete waste of time.

Sin and Punishment might be a bit too "core" for him to get right away - and digital content delivery isn't something that he's quite down with yet. It's a good suggestion, though, and I'll keep it in mind.

I don't mean to mischaracterize him - he becomes easily frustrated, but when he pulls stuff off he feels like a bad-ass. If the QTEs aren't too bad he can learn how to do them, given time, and if he loses less than a minute anyway it should be okay.

2-player co-op is a pretty big deal. He's more likely to play if my brother is involved.

As to GTA style games.... I actually don't know. They weren't really big back when he played games.

Quick note again about Umbrella Chronichles, QTE's are more annoying on co-op. Both players are given different QTE prompts and BOTH must succed or it's a fail. I was playing with a friend and we were hung up on of those for like six tries.

Gears on casual might be decent for him. It's got co-op, and the stop and pop style of shooting is a lot less stressful then twitchy FPS's.

The co-op QTE thing has the potential to be either mindbendingly frustrating or absolutely hilarious depending on how he and my brother react to it.

Gears is a pretty solid suggestion. I'll hint at my brother to get the old man to run through training on casual, then the two of them can maybe try the co-op.

Thanks for the advice, guys.

Both Gears and Umbrella Chronicles should be super cheap used by now, right? Why not get both? Two new styles of shooting (IR pointing and the cover system) and they're both co-op.

And if he likes both swords and guns, I bet Red Steel costs five bucks by now. It's really easy, and really fun, and has the cheesiest bad movie dialogue ever. It's the closest thing to a video game adaptation of Showdown in Little Tokyo I've ever played.

Man Red Steel did not even cross my mind but that is a bitching suggestion

+4 cool points for RubangB