Disconnected: Multiplayer

Let’s talk about multiplayer. No, not the kind where you go onto an online battlefield and shoot people whilst shouting down a headset at them; the local multiplayer kind, when any form of abuse to the person you are playing with could actually end in a real life fight. That’s the best kind, right? I mean, you’re sitting next to who you are playing against (or with, co-operatively) so surely it must be better. What’s the point in playing against someone that you might not actually know and that you can’t even see?

Just a little over two months ago, I would have argued against this; I would claim that online multiplayer is absolutely fantastic and nothing else can beat it. Now I’m the opposite; I don’t believe that you can beat that feeling of having the other players in the same room as you when you’re playing a game. I used to believe this, before online multiplayer came along and ruined the local multiplayer fun I used to have on my N64.

Goldeneye 64. You knew it was coming, I knew it was coming and anyone that has the slightest knowledge of this game knew it was coming. I distinctly remember blowing myself up in a lift with a rocket on that game, much to my cousin and I’s amusement. It wasn’t just that, though, I put in many, many hours into the splitscreen on this game. What was so great about it? The fact that you could both witness what was happening on one screen; that’s been lost with online gaming (unless you have a friend next door that can run really fast).

Since I’ve been disconnected from online gaming, I’ve rediscovered local multiplayer due to having a few awesome flatmates that like playing games. One of the first things we did was play through the co-op story on Splinter Cell: Conviction. It was brilliant, I had tried to play it with another friend online before, but it lagged and it was hard to tell where to go (you can’t point to the screen with a finger when you’re playing online – unless you have a really massive hand). We completed it on the hardest difficulty and had a lot of fun playing it; I had forgotten how awesome local co-op was before this.

Local multiplayer is awesome, although I don’t seem to own enough games with it. It’s mostly my 360 games that have splitscreen (strange, isn’t it?), so we’ve played a little bit of Forza, some Castle Crashers and some Gears of War. All of these were a bit of fun, but none match the fun of the classic Goldeneye splitscreen multiplayer. The Zombie mode in Black Ops also provided a short while of splitscreen entertainment; although the fact that you need to be online to play Combat Training is very strange and downright stupid.

I’ve actually been put off from buying games depending on what the multiplayer’s like. I rented Black Ops because it’s mainly an online-based game, my flatmate suggested F1, but I soon found out that it didn’t have splitscreen and that meant that I was definitely not buying it (down from probably not buying it). I’m actually still deciding whether to buy LittleBigPlanet 2 or not; it has a fantastic co-op system, but the fact that I won’t have access to the millions of online levels is a big downside.

Then there’s Rock Band. My flatmates and I bought some drums, a microphone and another guitar so we could get the full band experience and so that we’d all have a controller to use if we all wanted to play. I managed to get Rock Band 3 and it’s simply brilliant. For the week after I got it, we all played it pretty much non-stop and I had more fun than I’ve had in a while whilst playing multiplayer. Rock Band is so much better locally, actually seeing your friends making a fool of themselves rather than just listening to them over a headset is fantastic.

I’ve came to the conclusion over the last couple of months that local multiplayer is absolutely fantastic and nothing else can beat it. Rock Band is just one of the examples of why local multiplayer is better, but it’s definitely the best. Not being able to play online may have seemed a terrible predicament at first, but due to my rediscovery of local multiplayer, it’s became the least of my worries. Who cares about playing against random ten year olds online when you can see people that you know make fools of themselves in your own house?