Now that Excremento’s gone from regularly posting his Top 10 lists, someone’s got to fill the void. I figured that, since I’ve done these in the past elsewhere, why not try?

I started working on these almost a year ago on my other blog as an angry response to some of ScrewAttack’s top 10 lists back in the day. Because I haven’t done one since August - and out of respect to Excremento – I chose not to bring the feature along with me to Destructoid when I started this blog. But I figured now was as good a time as any other to introduce everyone to 10 Best, which my take on top 10 lists. Sometimes, these will just be on things I’m thinking about at the time, and other times, they’ll be responses to other top 10 lists I see. But they’ll always be what I think, which sometimes will go against what the general consensus is. Then again, I don’t care what the general consensus is.

Tonight, it’s a list of my top 10 multiplayer experiences, the ones I’ve personally experienced. There are some games on here which are gonna be expected, and others will be surprises, but I’ll try my best to validate their existence on the list.

Two quick notes here:

1) Multiplayer = 3+ people. Two-player action alone does not count, because too many games would fall under that category.

2) I can only count games I have played. I have not played Team Fortress 2 or World of Warcraft or Warhawk or Rock Band in-depth yet, so don't bitch about that not being on there, okay?

But with out further ado, here's:



Multiplayer Experiences I’ve Had

10.) PictoChat



Wait, whut? PictoChat?!?!

Yes.

Now, for some of you, PictoChat’s not a game, and for others, it’s a stupid little thing that comes with your DS that you use to send penis drawings to your friends. But if you want to draw more, it can be incredibly fun. You can come up with small little games for PictoChat, like playing a variation on Pictionary, playing a game where each person adds to the picture, and so on. PictoChat is really a more-wide open game that’s a lot of fun if you know how to use it right.

Probably the best example of how much fun it can be was in the summer of 2006 during my trip to Japan. When I was with my friends on the shinkansen to Hiroshima, we were stuck in the silent car on the Hikari Rail Star, which meant no announcements and minimal noise. With few options on what to do and not really being able to talk, we all pulled out our DSes, fired up PictoChat and blew 90 minutes doodling, drawing, and having a great time.

Also, we drew lots of penises.

9.) The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventure



Four Swords Adventure is a game that’s one of the many Gamecube games people overlooked. However, romping through Hyrule with three of your buddies is a wonderful time, even if it required you all to have Game Boy Advances and connector cables to do so. It’s beautiful to look at and reeks of the greatness of A Link to the Past, but this time, you get to compete with your friends for Force Gems. And you can be a total dick while doing so, including carrying them around, throwing them off ledges, setting them on fire and blowing them up. If you’ve got a Wii or a Gamecube and don’t have this, consider picking it up. It might require a lot to get off the ground (the GBA/connector issue turned a lot of people off), but it’s worth it.

8.) The Simpsons Arcade



Maybe the most expensive multiplayer experience on here, only because you and your buddies would blow through quarters while rampaging through Springfield with Homer, Bart, Lisa and Marge and their powers. Still, Konami’s classic side-scroller is chock full of fun, complete with crazy bosses and a fast, energetic style of play that still is fun to this very day.

The Simpsons Game would try to bring back that feeling many years later, without much of the same success. The arcade title is still not only the best Simpsons game, but one of the best multiplayer experiences and one of the best beat-‘em-ups ever made.

7.) NBA Jam/NBA Jam: Tournament Edition



I’ll go on the record saying that I love NBA Jam. To this day, it’s one of my favorite sports games of all time, and nothing is quite as fun as four-player NBA Jam on the Super Nintendo. For me, this generally degraded into either an in-game shoving match until one of us got the ball and power-dunked it on someone, or a game with nobody playing defense where everyone was just chucking up threes and trying to slam the ball down on the other team. Add the hidden characters like Bill Clinton into the game, and you’ve got yourself a winner. It’s a great way to waste an afternoon with your buddies.

6.) Daytona USA



A while ago, I did a 10 Best list of the best Arcade Racing Games, and Daytona USA showed up on top. It shows up here again because there’s nothing quite like hopping into one of the 8-player cabinets and firing it up against 7 other people.

Now, we’re talking mostly about the 8-player arcade cabinet here, like the ones you’ll find at Dave and Busters. What makes this such a fun time is not just the fact that Daytona USA is fun, but competing in real-time against 7 other human beings and slamming each other around, making death-defying passes, and feeling the feedback from your steering wheel makes this an experience well worth playing.

5.) Halo 3



Picking up where the critically-acclaimed Halo 2’s multiplayer left off, Halo 3 added in new weapons, new maps (some with familiar feels), and brand-new features like filesharing capabilities, online stat-tracking and the new Forge feature that let you customize maps how you saw fit. The end result is one of the most open-ended console multiplayer experiences to date, especially due to the Forge feature, which has allowed for all kinds of creative game types and maps to be created.

But equally, there are downsides. I am not a huge fan of the TrueSkill system, and it can be especially frustrating when this system penalizes you for things such as having bad teammates. On top of that, weapons balance is not as good as it could be. Namely, Bungie severely over-compensated for the Needler being a weak weapon in Halo 2 by making it a nearly-unstoppable powerhouse in Halo 3. They also still have yet to address the fact that melee attacks are overpowered as well. Plus, everyone on matchmaking still seems to want to play Slayer and Slayer alone, and some of the maps are no longer much fun to play on (I’m looking at you Snowbound). But still, it’s one of the better overall multiplayer experiences I’ve had in recent memory.

4.) GoldenEye 007



Halo 3, however, does not top the first true FPS multiplayer experience I had. Way back in the Nintendo 64 days, I got GoldenEye 007as a Christmas present from my parents, and I proceeded to play the hell out of it. The best part, though, was the multiplayer, which gave you an incredible number of character models to pick from and a decent amount of game customization. The maps were pretty damn fun to play around with, and most of what modern FPS multiplayer experiences have were distilled from GoldenEye.

But why ahead of Halo 3, which has better graphics, super-customizable games and the Forge feature? Because while the game customization was not as deep as in Halo 3, there was nothing quite like gathering your friends around for some split-screen Rockets in the Temple action on a Friday night. That, my friends, was the original Friday Night Fights. Rockets in the Temple later served as inspiration for a Halo 3 custom game I called Boom!, and if you’ve played me in Halo 3, then you probably have run into it.

3.) Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare



Halo 3, however, is also not the best multiplayer experience out there right now. That award goes to Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty 4, which takes everything Halo 3 does in matchmaking and says “Anything you can do, I can do better.”

To begin with, there’s a class system, which gives you different perks and weapons depending on what class you select. You can also change classes during combat, so if you start as a Sniper but need to move to Demolitions, you can change your class, though changes don’t take affect until the next time you’re killed. On top of that, there’s room for five custom classes that you can create. Sweet.

As for experience, you can gain points by either killing opponents or completing certain objectives. As you gain more experience, your level and rank go up, regardless of whether your team wins or not. This is much more of an improvement over Halo’s arbitrary TrueSkill system that penalizes you for having bad teammates that make you lose by 30 points. At the highest level – Level 55, Rank Commander – you can unlock Prestige mode, which lets you trade in your rank and start over at level 1 for a special in-game insignia. Since you can do this up to 10 times, this means you can theoretically reach a level of 605. Now that’s replay value.
On top of normal weaponry, you can also call in UAVs, air strikes, and attack helicopters by getting a certain number of kills in a row, and any kills the air strikes or helicopters pick up count towards your total.

Take note, Bungie: this is what modern multiplayer gaming should be like. Call of Duty 4 is going to be the new standard for online multiplayer gaming for some time to come.

2.) Perfect Dark



Perfect Dark took everything GoldenEye did and improved upon it 100 times over. Like the ability to select your character’s look? Well, now you can mix and match heads and bodies in whatever order you choose. Want more customization in setting up games? You’ve got it. Want better levels, with a few classic GoldenEye ones thrown into the mix? Yep, you got it. All in all, Perfect Dark is one of those games that you can play with friends for hours on end.

Two things in particular made it stick out for me:

1.) Amazing choices when it comes to AI. You can pretty much customize the game’s bots to fit whatever situation you might be looking for, due to the wide variety of them. While you might wonder how this adds to multiplayer, it’s beneficial to certain kinds of games where you might need 8 players instead of just 3 or 4, or certain things like team battle (with 2 humans on a side) or partner battle with one human per team.

2.) Dual-function weapons. Every weapon in the game had a second function. Why no one uses this in FPS games today, I will never know, but this made multiplayer a blast. Some features, like the Laptop Gun’s sentry feature, the Slayer’s fly-by-wire rocket feature, or the ability to snipe people through walls with the XR 20, made this game incredibly fun to play. Again, why isn’t this in today’s games? It’s a fantastic feature.

But it’s not the #1 game on the list. That honor goes to…






1.) Super Smash Bros. Melee



Surprise, surprise! Nintendo’s mascot fighting free-for-all ranks as my top multiplayer experience. It lacked online multiplayer, but it made up for it in a number of other ways.

Building off the successful Smash Bros. platform, Melee introduced new characters, new weapons and new stages that added a lot more fun and strategy to the game. There’s a reason you can still go to pretty much any anime convention or gaming tournament and find a Smash Bros. Melee game – its fun and challenging at the exact same time.

Not having online multiplayer also allows for wonderful trash-talking amongst friends, which is something I always like to have as an option. On top of that, add in a decent amount of match customization, and you’ve got a great multiplayer experience.

I cannot tell you how many hours I have spent, both in high school and college, sitting in front of a TV playing Smash Bros. Brawl with my friends. But these are among some of my best times playing games ever, and along with the fact that Brawl is a fantastic multiplayer game, is the reason that this game sits at the top of my list.

However, the time Melee will have at the top of the list is limited. Super Smash Bros. Brawl and its new features look to make Melee seem like a relic of the past, just like Melee did to the original Smash Bros.

Honorable Mentions:
Bomberman Live
Halo 2
Mario Kart 64
Mario Kart DS
Starcraft
Super Smash Bros.
Timesplitters 2
Wii Sports

Don’t forget to vote in the latest Worst. Character. Ever. match-up!