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So last weekend, I finally fired up Resident Evil 5 for some online co-op. I played through some co-op chapters with a very helpful Frenchman, who didn’t even surrender to the zombies once, and because of this, I won’t say anything bad about the French for at least a week, starting…. Now.

After taking a break and plowing through a couple more chapters on my own, I was joined by an 11-year-old girl.

Now, back in my day, if you wanted to play an NES game with an Alaskan twice your age, you had to meet him at the bus depot like a normal person, though I have to say my parents were never too thrilled with that. Oh, how times have changed.

I don’t really mind kids on Xbox Live in games such as Halo 3 or Gears of War 2 where you have about 10 people playing at once. Yeah, they can be annoying, but most of them are pretty quiet and they’re easy to ignore if they do start yelling nonsense.

On the one hand, kids are usually masters at these games since they have enough free time that all they do is play these games, but I really dislike playing with kids in games where there’s only one other person, because you kind of have to watch what you say.

I’m just not good at this. If a zombie hits me from behind with a stick of dynamite, I’m going to yell out a four letter word, and it’s going to rhyme with either “truck” or “knit.”

So yeah, I probably taught this kid some new words, and I do feel kind of bad about it, but on the other hand, RE5 is a gory, violent, M-Rated game, the equivalent of an R-Rated zombie movie like “Dawn of the Dead.” And maybe things have changed from when I was a kid, but if I was going to drop $60 on a game tape, I was getting that money from my parents.

So yes, I will slip up and shout an occasional obscenity on Xbox Live, but it’s not like I’m going out of my way to play Disney games with pre-teens. Maybe if parents don’t want their kids to hear that kind of language, they shouldn’t buy them mature games.