Slashdot Mirror
Two Players, One Console, Cooperative Play?
boredme asks: "With the free time I'll have this summer, I thought I'd get in some quality couch-potato time. I'm married, no children, and our Playstation2 is nice because it can be both more interactive than TV and more social than a computer since it's in the living room. The problem is that the vast majority of two player games are sports or arena fighting games that only allow confrontational interaction; since I have a dozen extra years experience gaming, these competitive games get old very quickly for both of us. What suggestions for cooperative, (not online) multiplayer games do the Slashdot folks have?" Along a similar vein, the Gauntlet games (available for most platforms) offer similar opportunities for co-operative play, but no other titles come to mind right now. What co-op games do you have fun with that you can play using a single console?
"The perfect example of this is Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. The whole game, with storyline, can be played through with one or two players alike. Others, like Jedi Starfighter, are close as they offer a small set of two-player missions that are distinct from the one-player missions. (Googling for this, by the way, has turned up very short lists at best.)
I'm primarily interested in PS2 games, but I still want to know what XBOX, GameCube, or even PS1 or PC games in this category are available. I'd even like to hear about sports games that offer a cooperative mode, or games not yet released."
purchased this game a while back with exactly this scenario in mind. My wife still declines to play it. It's weird...she loves sci-fi and fantasy, but the idea of an RPG of any sort strikes her as "over the geek-line". any other suggestions here would be *greatly* appreciated.
You see, without that little doohicky, the universe stops.
http://propheteer.org
My wife and I play a fair bit of Super Monkey Ball 2 mini-games. Some are co-operative, some are competitive - but the competition doesn't get in the way of participation.
Games like Crazy Taxi or Tony Hawk can be fun too - while I'm a lot better than my wife, the competition isn't direct so it works well.
In sort of another vein, my wife likes playing Legend of Zelda, but she has enough difficulty playing it that often she wants me there helping/watching. Being able to dip around with the Tingle Tuner makes this work pretty good.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Anybody remember the Ninja Turtles coin-op game? That was a lot of fun to play with a friend. There was a whole slew of them. The Simpsons! Heh.
In this day and age of consoles with 4 controller ports, gotta admit I'm saddened that this genre has disappeared. You didn't need no stinking split-screen.
Fortunately, there is a Ninja Turtles game for the GameCube in the works.
"Derp de derp."
At E3 (electronic entertainment expo) the big thing in the nintendo area was cooperative play.
No use to the author since but for cube owners (preferably with a few GBAs and link cables) it'll be great as soon as these hit the market (i think a few were targeted for christmas release).
There were 3 that stood out to me...
A pacman game where 3 players control ghosts on the TV in pretty 3D and a 4th player controls pacman on his/her GBA.
A legend of zelda: wind waker spinoff called Tetra's Trackers where 4 players play competatively in scavenger hunt type missions (for the first few levels at least). I don't know if there may be some cooperative play (a la mario party) later on, but the games are simple enough that the playing field is pretty even for veteran gamers and newbies alike.
And a new Final Fantasy game that's kind of diablo like gameplay for up to 4 players. All cooperative and played with GBAs plugged into the cube with status screens/menus on the GBA.
No good for sony users and not in time for summer, but something to look forward to. Seems like cooperative play may be the next big thing (from what I saw from the heavyweights at E3).
DONT PANIC
Either of those for PS2 are great cooperative games. Not exactly tons of thought needed, but great for a couple people to play cooperatively. Whenever I bring it over for the weekend hang-out sessions, it always ends up being in there most of the night and with people fighting for the controller. It's even more fun when you use the unlock codes to unlock all the characters that you normally can't get without playing an insane number of times through. Yeah, there are lots of cool things that unlocking doesn't do, but having zillions of characters to choose from makes it more fun.
Um, Halo has a fantastic 2-player Co-op mode. Of course, it's xbox only.
My wife and I love these. While it isn't cooperative, you can pick up PS1 versions of YDKJ games for 5 bucks, and they are a blast but don't require both players to have similar hand eye skills (although the Jack Attacks might be an exception.)
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Monkey Ball (1 & 2), Mario Party 4
Serious Sam (both the first and second encounters) are the only PC titles I've seen with multiplayer play on one computer (split-screen), and their cooperative mode is fun. I would assume they've got the same cooperative mode in the xbox version.