Epic Default Productions

I’ve been noticing a trend lately.

As one of my previous posts states, I was out of gaming for a long time, so this has probably been a problem for a while now, and it might be too late to fix. But that’s not going to stop me from bitching about it.

What happened to Multiplayer? No, I’m not talking about online gaming, I enjoy that. I think it’s an awesome innovation (for consoles, I realize it’s been around for a while on PCs). What I’m talking about is the invite your friends over to your place for an all out, split screen battle royal. Where did that go?

Oops, I said a dirty word, split screen. I can hear all of you shiver at the thought. You’re the people I’m looking at while I pound the keys to oblivion writing this. Most “multiplayer” games out there now require you to have an Internet connection, and your only interaction with your opponents outside of the physical game is through an earpiece and, in rare cases, a camera.

I’m probably going to catch a lot of flak for this, but that form of interaction disinterests me. I’d much rather have someone sitting next to me who I can beat with my controller when they are sniping me from some hidden location, or fucking up the drums on “Still Alive.”

Yes, I still play Halo, because it has split screen. The game itself is very meh, but the multiplayer aspect, be it online or in person, is still great to this day. Especially when you play “Drunken Halo”, the drinking game the other Fanboys and I came up with one night. If you’re looking for a quick way to get smashed, try it. I have yet to play Call of Duty 4 (it’s in my Game Q, relax) and Rock Band (I’m as pissed as you are), but I’m sure they would inspire the same joy that Halo does in me.

When GTAIV came out, and I heard it had a multiplayer, I was ecstatic. I envisioned my friends and I reeking havoc together within Liberty City. Needless to say, I was rather disappointed when I found it’s only online. However, that I can understand. The world is pretty damn big; so it would probably be a lot of searching for each other, followed by 10 seconds of a good firefight, then back to searching again.

You probably saw Anthony’s review on Mario Kart Wii, in which he asked Nintendo “What the Fuck?” when describing their multiplayer aspect. No longer can you have an all for one battle to see who is supreme. You now need teams, and I have to say, I agree with Anthony. I’m not even going to go into how much Brawl’s multiplayer sucked. I will say this though; cool your jets on the wide-angle lens.

I’m excited reading about Quantum of Solace, the next game in the 007 series. I think we all can agree that Goldeneye was the forerunner to multiplayer gaming on consoles. In turn we all can agree that, every other Bond game after that should probably be thrown into the same dump that ET is in. So when I hear that the same guys who did CoD4 are putting this game together, I get a little giddy.

So here’s an open request to Treyarch. Please, please, PLEASE keep the multiplayer on a single game. Don’t make me have to get on Xbox Live to play with others as Bond. Let’s be honest, the campaign mode, more than likely, will be underwhelming at best. And if that’s the case, it will be hard for me to get my friends to buy it, just to play online. Please, let me, this one last time, invite my friends over, order a pizza, let the beverages flow, and have a fun night of actual, social gaming.

I’ll get off my knees now.

Where it really ticked me off was Burnout Paradise. The Burnout franchise is screaming for multiplayer. The split screen driving on the previous games were just a schizophrenic joyride through the streets looking for your next target. Paradise moved that online, too. So now I have to get my friends to get the game, just to have some sort of multiplayer fun with it.

I think I may have just found the reasoning behind this. Like most things, it’s the almighty dollar. Why put a decent multiplayer system for home gaming in a game, when, if you take that out, more people with have to buy the game in order to play with each other? Then, more than likely, you’ll have to spend more money to get the Internet connection, and, in Microsatan’s case, more money to be able to use that connection to play your game with others.

And people wonder why the game prices are so high. It’s not the cost of production, packaging, shipping, whatever. It’s the fact that we are willing to pay that much, simply out of necessity. The sad part is I have no ideas as to how to fix it. They snuck this under our nose and we allowed them to do it. Now, it’s such a nail in the gaming universe, that the only way to stop it, is to give up gaming all together. That’s a situation that has a zero to nil chance of ever happening.

Jesus, time to schedule another Drunken Halo night.

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