For all of you dads that are into tabletop gaming, be advised: Teach Your Kids to Game Week starts tomorrow. For our Spanish-speaking readers, that’s mañana.

Teach Your Kids to Game Week runs this year from Monday, December 3 to Friday, December 7. It was started last year by a site called DriveThruRPG, who offers all sorts of nerdtastic tabletop gaming rule books available in print, or EPUB, MOBI or PDF.

It took Phil Villarreal “about 50 times” to beat Ganon in 1986′s The Legend of Zelda on the NES when he was eight years old. Phil’s five year old son, Luke, just beat him in three tries. The rest of Villareal’s story is told on Kotaku, at the link below.

It’s awesome to see fathers sharing old gaming franchises with their kids – but even better when they share the actual old games with them! Villarreal says he and his son played The Legend of Zelda on their Nintendo 3DS, and he still had to commandeer the game from his son to beat the hard parts…which is totally cool because those Wizzrobes were total buttholes in the later levels.

In the end, Villarreal had a great time with Luke, and that’s what gaming with your kid’s all about. Despite his feeling like he helped Luke out too much, Villarreal did incredibly powerful things with his kid: spent time with him, shared a hobby, made the kid feel important and powerful, and yeah, defeated Ganon.

Kotaku also kept the dad and Zelda theme going with another post yesterday…check it out.

(Thanks to Brandon Burchfiel for pointing us in the direction of this story)

Ask a dad what he wants for Father’s Day, and he’ll tell you “oh, anything” or “nothing, I’m happy just spending time with you.” Lies. What that guy wants (and needs) is a Turtle Beach headset for his gaming pleasure. Specifically, the Turtle Beach Ear Force X32 (XBox 360) are a great gift for a gamer-dad. I mean, sure, you could just buy him a gift card to Best Buy (or Future Shop for our Canadian readers), but the dude’s just going to end up buying these for himself.

And if you’re a dad, stop playing coy and just tell your family that you want to ear-hump these headphones so bad that it’s effecting your kill-death ratio.

Now, before we get into it – Turtle Beach does indeed have many headsets – and in fact, many headsets above the X32 in quality. But if you’re looking for a good balance between price and power, the X32 is what you’re looking for.

Episode 015: Bumblebee Tuna

This week’s episode covers the following stories on 8bitdad.com for the week leading up to January 31st, 2012: #Kidlit Twitter Search; Stephen Colbert’s Full Interview With Children’s Book Author Maurice Sendak; Meet The DaDs Army: A Gaming Clan for Fathers; Best Father Daughter Wedding Dance Ever; English Blokes ‘New Fathers 4 Justice’ Rallying Against Ken Clarke This Saturday

CORRECTION: We were notably knee-deep in Mickey’s when we said AND listed the wrong website for New Fathers 4 Justice at 34:15. The correct web address should be: newfathers4justice.co.uk

Many fathers in our 8BitDad generation grew up playing video games. We were lucky enough to experience the golden age of coin-op arcades, with giant-screened Street Fighter II and NBA Jam machines. We watched arcades fall in favor of home consoles and PCs. We huddled together in rooms late night to play the Super NES and N64, Sega Genesis, Saturn and Dreamcast and the Sony PlayStation. We improvised set-ups to play serial cable-linked games of Doom II and Quake before dial-up became cable and DSL (or university T1s) and allowed us to play games over the net like Unreal Tournament and Counter-Strike. You get the picture – our generation runs deep. And if all that reminiscing didn’t bring a tear to your eye, you’re not one of us.

Somewhere along the way, we got married and had kids. But just because we’ve taken on bigger responsibilities doesn’t mean that fathers don’t still want to slap on a pair of headphones, crack open a beverage and hunker down in front of an FPS for a couple of hours. With the wives and kids safely tucked-in, and the whole night ahead of them, the [DaDs] Army became a meeting place for fathers to blow off a little steam and enjoy some mature, parents-only online gaming.

Think of it as the YMCA for dudes like us.