Co-op gaming. Or rather, how my wife and I spend our time

Multiplayer gaming. Look at where we are today. Xbox Live, PSN, and of course PC gaming. Right now I’m just going to focus on consoles. And especially with this generation of consoles, there’s a large increase of online gamers and we’re even to a point where people will look at a game and say ‘But does it have multiplayer?’. And the game itself has to be able to survive that comment (say Bioshock for the most part).

Let’s talk about the history of multiplayer gaming. Back in the old days, it was 2 player. Then we moved to split screen. Then 4 player and multitaps. Xbox brought about LAN and internet play (though of course there were others before, I’ll use them as the best case), DS and PSP have ad-hoc and online. But for a while there, something got lost along the way. Co-op play started to suffer.

So go back to our roots. Back in the NES/SNES/Genesis days, if a game said 1-2 players it was usually co-op. Sure some were take turns (say Pac-man) but most of the time it was team. Contra, TMNT Arcade, Final Fight, Streets of Rage to name some of the bigger ones. Any of the old beat em ups were usually 2 players.

Look at recently, where PS2/Xbox which had another genre, the dungeon crawler. We had Champions of Norath, Baldur’s Gate, D+D heroes. All from the same formula like our old side scrolling fighters, but all co-op. The problem was, we actually hit a wall where there was little to no more co-op story modes coming.

Now, with all this online gaming, co-op is not as high up on the to do list as it once was. If a game has multiplayer, it’s mainly deathmatch and vs. play. Now you can argue that this a form of co-op, you’re part of a team trying to achieve a goal, but is it really? This isn’t the old days of story mode being co-op. And to be fair, there are some games out there that allow it. Halo, Gears, R6:Vegas, DW series, Xmen/Marvel etc..but my wife and I have noticed that those games have diminished. One main reason for this is that games are too graphically intensive now.

With the move from co-op to vs. play, skill now means disparity. Back then, you helped your little brother out if he was getting beat up. Now, you’re shooting him but because his skill isn’t as good as yours, it’s not really a challenge. My friends come over all the time and get annoyed by me shooting them up. Now in co-op, unless you decide to go for the bad ending in Streets of Rage, you’re not playing against each other.

Luckily for us, these games are getting released again, mainly on XBL. 2 player Streets of Rage and 4 player TMNT brings back those memories and that team mentality. And that’s why I love co-op play. My wife and I play all the time, and she’ll readily admit that her skill isn’t close to mine. This is why we wait for Halo 3, for a chance to sit down and play side by side again (maybe even online with others thanks to 4 player co-op) and play against the game, not each other. But I hope to see more of these in the future.

As much fun as versus play is, I’d like to play games with my daughter one day where I can assist her in 2 player mode, much like my cousins did with me when I was younger. Of course, if she follows in my footsteps, you’ll be hearing her over your Live headset in a few years cussing like her old man. And that would make me proud.