Remember as a child, you and a friend/family member would sit in front of the TV and play various co-op games, combining your efforts towards beating a game you probably couldn’t beat alone? Games like Battletoads, Double Dragon, Streets of Rage, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (after part 1),Gunstar Heroes, ToeJam and Earl, etc. Quality titles were made for two players and games like these brought kids together. A lot of games like these had at least 3 playable characters and once you and your buddy picked the characters you wanted, you’d wish it was a 2 or 4 player game so you could have more people in your quest for justice (let’s be real, they were all a quest for justice in some regards). What ever happened to those unity creating games?
It's already captioned....and it's right
Simple, these games were pushed aside for more competitive games. Besides the typical one on one game like the Street Fighters, Mortal Kombats, and Tekkens of the world, we’ve also been hit with an abundance of online shooters. These games all promote individual supremacy that completely takes away from the camaraderie of those team up games. If I’m playing a shooter, I want to have the most kills, even if I’m on a team. I just have to be the best or at worst, top three. I know people that don’t even play the one player story mode for most of these shooters, it’s straight to the multiplayer from day one. Gaming tournaments feature fighting games prominently; competitive games like Street Fighter and the Marvel vs Capcom series. Why would the industry steer away from the co-op games and move towards the competitive games you ask? What’s the root of all evil? Money.
super double dragon was the truth
I know what you’re thinking, “city_limits is reaching worse than Unl3Fac3 Stretch Armstrong”, but follow me on this. With those true co-op games, both gamers didn’t need to purchase the game. We played it side by side on the same console. Unless both players wanted to play alone, both did NOT need to pick up that title. These were games you could get good at fairly quickly and not need to get better than a certain level because you didn’t have to change the difficulty level past medium. You can’t do this in the competitive world of gaming. If I own this game and you don’t, I’m going to be better than you more often than not. I’m going to trash talk you and you are going to go pick up the game so you can play it yourself and practice so you can get revenge. I hope you have your tin foil hat on tight because it doesn’t end there.
If ensuring that as many people as possible have to purchase games wasn’t enough, they bring us the chance to go online. “But city_limits, online play is basically a benefit for gamers isn’t it?” Yes it is, but it also steers gamers into more competitive gaming and continues to add revenue into the pockets of those fatcat developers. Yeah you get the convenience of playing friends without having to go to their house or vice versa, but you also have a more competitive gaming market now. You now have hundreds of thousands of people playing shooters online across the globe. You have to get nice now, you can’t have a horrible kill ratio when your friends can check and trash talk you. You have people everywhere playing vs games like Marvel vs Capcom 3 (seriously, I played a guy in England while sitting at home in Maryland prior to PSN being hacked). And where they get that extra money is in the DLC. Now we all buy new characters to see if they will make us better and we download new map packs to see if we can find an advantage there. Due to this addiction to the competitiveness and the desire to be the best, we’re walking away from the simple team up games that helped make the gaming industry what it is today.
Mortal Kombat is the latest game to hit the competitive gaming world
The days of the stress free team up is quickly dying while a new age of competitive, money draining, gaming is asserting its dominance. I don’t know about you but I’m going to pick up one of the above mentioned games, or another like them, and I’m going to hit up a friend for some old school, boss beating co-op game play. Who’s up for some Scott Pilgrim vs The World?
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5 Comments
That shot was for what I said in the Guardian Heroes article, wasn’t it?
Otherwise, a good read.
Had to double post on this one. I found this wonderful Destructoid article that pretty much feels the same way you do, kind of.
Anyways, it was a great read. Made me miss the times we played HORRIBLE games but had fun with them b/c they were co-op.
Remember beating Fantastic Four & Ironman/X-O Man-O-War on PS1? Good times. How bout getting through the 1st parts of Neo-Contra? Classic. And finally, when we’d make it a point to beat Turtles in Time on the SNES in under 30mins like it was our jobs.
I say all this to say we gotta keep the co-op going bro.
I remember playing Starfox 64 as a kid, and me and my cousins would take turns playing levels until we completed the entire game…good memories
Ah man… Pocky and Rocky, Legend of Oasis, hell Turtles in Time and Streets of Rage 2 are my grandma’s (RIP) and mom’s favorite games respectively. I miss those days. It’s cool they started to come up with the hop in/drop out gameplay that they have in games like the Lego titles, Warriors, and whatnot, but those games overall are far and few in-between unless you’re actually playing arcade games based off of the past games in question and I don’t know how fond I am of the arcade games. I think the industry has forced me to evolve with it and I just don’t care for the mimics. If it ain’t the Originals, I don’t care enough.
With KJ mentioning Starfox, I think I miss the days of the crazy N64 multiplayer madness more than the 2D sidescroller goodness. Original Smash Bros, Goldeneye, Mario Kart, Diddy Kong Racing, Starfox, the list goes on and on.
oh man. goldeneye and perfect dark. we used to run around slapping each other for days.