Gaming with Friends

I recently started a somewhat regular gaming night at my house with various co-workers. Every Wednesday night, or every other at the moment, we get together and play a game for several hours. We spent two nights going through LittleBigPlanet and just recently we played all the way through Castle Crashers.

Doing this has reminded me just how fun local gaming is. Aside from the very occasional Halo LAN party and a month long Smash Brothers Brawl binge with my roommates in April ’08 I really haven’t done much multiplayer gaming with actual people in the same room since early highschool. I still play plenty of multiplayer games, but they are generally all on Xbox Live with Slevin and whomever we get matched with.

I don’t want to give off the wrong impression here; I think online multiplayer is one of the best things to happen to gaming as a social activity since sliced bread. What? Anyway, what I’m getting at is there is something to be said for gaming with actual human interaction rather than a disembodied voice over a headset. Especially if it’s a crude racist one.

Something about playing in the same room as someone provides a much more vivid and shared experience that has the potential to be a lot more fun. Part of it is that you are probably more likely to be playing with friends if they are at your house rather than online, but I imagine even gaming with total strangers in the same room would be a more enjoyable experience than online. There is no longer a veil of anonymity to hide behind. Another thing is ever since the Xbox had its dashboard updated with the NXE, Xbox Live has been a much quieter place. Everyone, including myself now hang out in party chats. This leads to situations where two groups fighting each other will be spread among several chat channels and unable to communicate. Some people may not even be chatting with people playing the same game.

The nice thing about the last generation of consoles was while online console gaming was becoming more prevalent, all the remnants of past local play were still in place. Multiplayer games generally had online, LAN, and splitscreen options. Lately though splitscreen seems to be getting phased out. Games like Gears of War, Call of Duty 4, Team Fortress 2 and Crackdown limit how many people can play per console. You can still get the full multiplayer effect over LAN, but that requires several consoles and several televisions, which can get quite cumbersome quite fast.

Part of what spawned the previous paragraph was my attempt to think up games we could play together on our game nights. After finishing LBP and Castle Crashers, we couldn’t really come up with many current gen games we could all play together. We excluded most shooters cause one of the participants is not a gamer and the dual stick controls is definitely a difficult skill to grasp, but even still we’ve found ourselves looking into the past for games to play. Next on the queue is Four Swords for the GameCube, we somehow managed to find four GBAs and link cables in the depths of our closets. :) Am I just ignorant or have multiplayer games been downplaying using a single console lately? Maybe it’s an attempt to sell more games, but that seems like a pretty far-fetched and cynical conspiracy theory to me. Maybe it's the processing power required to run the game twice at the same time? I have my doubts about that one too, it was never an issue in the past.

I know the Wii is all about exactly what I’ve been talking about this whole time, but none of those games really interest me at all. I hate to jump on the “Nintendo abandoned the hardcore” bandwagon, but just about every multiplayer game I can think of on the Wii is a compilation of mini games I have no interest in playing. The only games I’ve given a second look on the Wii are the more traditional games like Metroid Prime 3 and No More Heroes. All of them have been single player.

Anyway, if I am just being ignorant please suggest some titles we could play. All consoles are a go.