My five-year-old son and I love to play video games together. We have a Microsoft Xbox and a Nintendo GameCube, and we are constantly searching for fun games that we can both enjoy. But the availability of games which are suitable for him and interesting enough to hold both of our attentions is pretty lame.

I had already concluded that Nintendo makes the best games, but I really wanted to find some good Xbox versions—because at home our Xbox is connected to the plasma TV, while the GameCube is hooked up to a standard TV. HD gaming on a widescreen TV can be a wonderful experience.

Very few Xbox games so far have managed to hold our attention, though. The only one of note: Shrek 2 from THQ. We could actually play together, which was a plus, and it really only got too difficult for us during the final battle.

That was an encouraging experience, and I went foraging for more. So we tried out a wide range of Xbox games, including the new SpongeBob game, Tak 2, movie tie-in games for The Incredibles and A Shark's Tale, and the latest Spyro game, which features the lovable purple dragon.

Alas, all of these games have a fatal flaw, which typically occurred during the first hour of play. After a fun romp, where you get to explore the world, find fun prizes, and interact with characters, each game would shift gears into a button-mashing, joystick twitching test of your reflexes.

In Tak2, we were forced to navigate a rapidly rushing stream while ducking under or jumping over logs and boulders. In SpongeBob we needed either to navigate a bathtub down a twisty railroad track in the desert, or finish a car race using the hamburger vehicle within a set amount of time. The Incredibles made us dash through suburban streets—again with a time limit—avoiding cars, buses, trucks, and the like. Spyro had a time-based airborne acrobatics game where you had to go through rings and bomb bad guys. Shark's Tale started out with a time-based test of reflexes: Press the buttons in the correct order, within a set time period.