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Split Screen Co-op Is Dying
kube00 writes "Split-screen co-op and local multiplayer are becoming things of the past. What happened to cramming a bunch of gamers into a room with two TVs and doing a system link match in Halo? Where have the all-night GoldenEye matches gone? Like the arcades of gamers' youth, the local multiplayer and co-op bonding experience has been replaced with individual gamers and a network."
nuff said.
Split-screen co-op is a sociable way to spend an evening with a mate or two (drop in a few beers too, of course).
I was most upset when it wasn't included in Resistance 2, after Resistance 1 had it. Turned it from an awesome shared experience to taking turns and one of you being a bit bored.
When you grow up, you find that you have less time for gaming. You find that some of your friends and colleagues stop gaming, because of life. Of those who still game, you have fragmentation among their preferred platforms and then fragmentation among the games they invest their time in. If you've managed to find one or two like-minded folk who happen to want to play the same game on the same platform, you have to deal with aligning everyone's schedules so that they can get together. Then, you get to lug some hardware around and rearrange furniture.
It's far easier to just have a seat on the couch or office chair and make use of that thing called the "Internet".
Blah, blah, blah, my friends and I play differently now. Let me generalize...
why is this news?
No, that link you posted to a web comic we've all seen a hundred times is not "obligatory."
Maybe it's just that people prefer the online world with more than two or 4 players. Imagine splitting the screen into 16 parts?
I'm a wanker.... and loving it!
frownie-face
You don't need to split the screen to play Contra!
Proper co-op should be one screen.
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Every week or so we have another "XYZ is dead" article.
I've come to think this is simply what magazines, bloggers, or corporate know-nothings resort to when they're starved for attention.
Online multiplayer: Requires N consoles, plus N copies of the game, plus N online service subscription fees.
Which scenario do you think the console and game manufacturers like better?
Be who you are...and be it in style!
They were obsoleted by a more convenient technology. Internet based multiplayer was not possible or practical at the time but today it is. In this era of immediate gratification it's too much effort to organize a bunch of friends and wait until you can all haul your gear over and set it all up. In may be more fun but the incremental amount of fun must not be worth it for most gamers.
That's the main advantage of consoles over PC games--the social, in person, experience of playing with your friends in your living room.
However, given that most of my friends still play this way as if it was made of crack, I doubt there is any substance to the claim, in any case.
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They were obsoleted by a more convenient technology. Internet based multiplayer was not possible or practical at the time but today it is. In this era of immediate gratification it's too much effort to organize a bunch of friends and wait until you can all haul your gear over and set it all up. In may be more fun but the incremental amount of fun must not be worth it for most gamers.
No-one hauled any gear over for split-screen co-op. Young people still go round each other's houses and would often end up playing split-screen co-op because the option was available.
I put my books on Amazon, Smashwords, Demonoid, ISOHunt and Pirate Bay. Search for 'Michael Cargill'
Every major game company is chasing the majority market with multimillion dollar production budget first person shooters. But there are still millions of gamers worldwide who would prefer adventure, split screen or arcade. As angry birds prove, games like Pacman can be still popular today and attract enough following to at least support a small team. Even text only interactive fiction has possibilities. People still read lots of books. Why wouldn't they read a book that asks you to solve interesting puzzles to read some more?
I agree. Online gaming is not a sufficient replacement for split-screen. I like playing split screen with my room-mates rather than them having to have an entire other system and internet connection. Including split-screen and online at the same time is a great idea as found in the Halo series.
I have Goldeneye for the Wii and am disappointed that it has split-screen and online multiplayer, but not at the same time. If me and one of my room-mates want to play, then we have to choose between playing 1-on-1 or trading the controller during online play.
Online and split-screen are both fun, but neither one should replace the other. The both serve important roles and complement each other.
I remember all the fun we had with my friends playing goldeneye on N64 ... ...
Even with the screen splitted in 4
Super Mario Bros Wii supports 4-player co-op. And it seems pretty stupid to ask "Where have the all-night GoldenEye matches gone?" when there's a new GoldenEye game for the Wii that supports 4-player split screen just like the original.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
The only time I play Halo online at home is when I'm playing with my roommate. Also, you should see the break room at work at around 3pm every day. Admittedly, it's not your usual workplace setup, but 3 TVs + 3 Xboxes = lots of people playing local split-screen.
Me and the missus play blackops online, split screen, most nights.
We have two 360's but splitscreen allows us to sit together and have a laugh rather than in seperate rooms.
I would give everything i own for a little bit more.
It's a shame in the sense that this split screen gaming and local multiplayer could go the way of the dodo bird if current trends continue (and by current trends, I mean console manufacturers pushing online gaming, where you don't need actual friends to play multiplayer; a person in the USA can play a game of Halo: Reach or Street Fighter with a person over in Germany.) Then again, it's simply showing the evolution of gaming, whether it be for better or for worse. It could also be somewhat connected to the ever declining need for face-to-face interaction, when all of our communication needs or everyday activities can be satiated right from the convenience of our bedroom - or your mother's basement - therefore eliminating the need to have friends you can communicate with in real life.
screens are so cheap now, many people have their own lappy they drag around, or a smartphone that can hook in. I predict that soon clever developers will hook into existing hardware. eg new consoles with bluetooth, wifi, usb2 etc become a hub, byo displays. The genre will shift a little to be more like site-specific networked gaming. bring on the future! I think also that what is happening is that games are leaving the living room, the London Tube Game Chromaroma (sic), Up In The Air and so forth. the spilt screen coop is really about a shared experience at its core, and this will never die. The above posters are correct i agree part of this slump is about revenue from broader gear consumption and subscription fees.
Waiting for the other shoe to...
What? I was playing multiplayer PC games back when DOOM and Quake were hot.
Consoles have always been on the trailing edge of technology, and, as this story demonstrates, they must be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern gaming world, every time there's a change. Consoles are for little kids and autistic adults. PCs are for gamers.
Really? How is online multiplayer only more convenient than hanging out with a friend and going "Hey, lets play some Halo?" and then you pop in the game and you both play on the same screen. According to you though, it's more "convenient" to have one person drive home, then get online and play. You can easily do BOTH. I also know a lot of gamers like myself who refuse to play online with random people due to the absolute truth of John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory (if you don't know what this is, google it).
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
This has been a problem for me for the last several years. The few console games I've found that actually allow cooperative play, split-screen or otherwise, have been complete shovelware. The PC games haven't been much better-- even some franchises, developers, publishers and so on which I'd come to rely on have decided to release their games without cooperative LAN play. (See Elemental: War of Magic. It might be added at some point, or not, but damn, was the head honcho of Stardock dismissive to the point of hostility when it came up, or what? Silly us, thinking that Sins of a Solar Empire established a precedent from them that we could rely on.)
Sorry to sound whiny, if I am, but cooperative play is a huge, important part of my life. My partner and I are both gamers, and the time we've spent together playing cooperative games has been time very well spent. I understand that there are market dynamics, target audiences, etc., ad infinitum, but I really do regret the absence of games I can play in a room with my friends.
What happened to serial cables to network two PCs to play Doom or Hexen? Kids today have no appreciation of technology...
That's easy: local gaming has mostly gone to the Wii, and you and I don't really play with the Wii.
This flowchart is surprisingly true as well as being funny.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
I'm a big fan of local co-op. I'm always on the lookout for games that have such options.
But there's more to local co-op than split-screen. I find games where you play together on the same (non-split) screen much more fun.
Two relatively recent examples:
* Trine
* The Lego series (Lego star-wars, Lego batman, Lego Indiana Jones, Lego Harry Potter)
* NBA / FIFA / other sports
Most of these games need game-pads or joysticks for co-op, but there's a wonderful program called ppjoy that emulates a gamepad in Windows, using the keyboard, so you can cram two people on one keyboard, or even plug in several USB keyboards and play without any real gamepad.
I also used our Xbox360 wireless gamepads using a USB receiver several times.
The author obviously doesn't own a Wii or hasn't bothered to check the number of games with local coop released today versus the number of games with local coop released 10 years ago. The average number of local coop games released per year seems about constant to me. Off the top of my head, this year on the PS3 alone we saw Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, Rock Band 3, Army of Two: The 40th Day, and a bunch of other cheap PSN games like Scott Pilgrim. Last year we saw the release of Borderlands and Resident Evil 5, both games that were practically made for local coop.
The internet can't replace split-screen's feeling - being next to your friends while playing is a different, much more fun experience. LAN gaming, on the other hand, can. More people have more consoles, and they are getting easier to move about, as are TVs (as they become flat). Why cram 4 players onto one console when you can have a console each?
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Tekken has a button-mashing platform sort of campaign mode that can be played single or multiplayer. The thing that I cant wrap my head around is why multiplayer can only be played using a net connection
My guess is that this is a case of "lets do it like those guys" that tested and failed imo
You forget that not everyone is a basement dweller. Split screen and LAN games are/were generally a nice social activity. Get a few friends, a few beers and make a fun evening in one place.
You can't really replicate that with on-line play and team speak.
Granted, those have their place too, and there are also the days you don't really want to have people around. Still, both have their advantages. Seeing that socializing in this form dies out just fastens our zombification as a society.
Not that complaining would help, so I don't. Just making an observation.
It was 1997, and when Goldeneye for the N64 came out, I would leave work on a friday, drive 2 hours to a friends place who had just bought the game.
For coop we taped a large piece of cardboard horizontally accross the middle screen, seperating the two views. One would sit on a beanbag under the card. One would sit on a tall recliner looking above the cardboard.
Each player had a small radar indicating the opposing player. We cut a disk and taped over that.
It was thrilling stuff. We might sleep that night. For singleplayer we would alternate, one being a spotter. Commentary between us would be constant. By midday Saturday, friends would arrive and it'd be splitscreen ladder matches. One guy was prone to accussing the other of cheating.
It was tense stuff, and when you heard the others gasp or laugh, you knew you were about to get a lead enema from behind. Satuday night was beers and a DVD. Then more GE about 6am till I would leave at midday sunday. I look back at that period very fondly.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Bed?
When I was a teen, everyone had cars and gas money but not everyone had a gaming console or a high speed internet connection. These days I imagine those trends have reversed.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Split screen always seemed like and awful thing to me - trying to cram all this different action onto a reduced-resolution portion of the screen. It's the same reason the Picture-in-Picture feature of TV sets is hardly used by anyone. There are probably better ways to have social gaming without dividing a single screen up.
... and then they built the supercollider.
That's one of the reasons why I focus on boardgames instead of computergames, like reading a book compared to watching a movie on average it can stimulate the mind more as the game design is usually more intricate and it is more social! I can recommend playing Puerto Rico and Imperial 2030, also see: BoardGameGeek ranking.
Speaking as a games programmer for an AAA game that eventually dropped split-screen support: Can't say I love the fact, but it *kind of* makes sense from a performance standpoint. Consider the following: You have a big bad detailed world to explore. You naturally don't want to keep the areas that the player doesn't see in video memory. Well, if you have split screen, tough luck, you have to keep in memory at worst twice as much, which is pretty bad. Of course you should need half as much detail for each view, but you'd have to implement a proper streaming system for that (like MegaTexture). Long story short, split screen support nowadays, especially for highly detailed worlds, is not a trivial problem to solve if you want to avoid excess performance costs. And when everybody is connected online anyway, it makes sense (financially) to drop it.
Split-screen co-op is a sociable way to spend an evening with a mate or two (drop in a few beers too, of course).
So is a LAN party, and it's more intellectual brother, the demoparty.
n/t
The most popular titles today all have excellent couch co-op and multi features. Examples:
Halo Reach
CoD Black Ops
SMB Wii
SM Cart
Gears of War series
There are also countless local multi games available on services like Xbox Live Arcade and PSN..
POKE 36879,8
I'm not sure how many of the posters on here actually play a console, but a surprising number of games simply DO NOT support four players (at least popular xbox titles). Most of them only support two players and despite saying four players it does not mean locally from one console(!!!!). I have went over to my friends and found that there are very few titles that you can actually play locally coop wise. Even the new halo requires you to have your OWN account to play the coop game modes for it and when playing online you either need your own account or you appear as the other persons name (1).
I don't think coop is dieing at all, I believe big corporations that back the consoles are killing it! It's much more profitable to have each person own a copy of the game and the console rather then having four people have fun on one. About the only corporation that isn't pushing this is Nintendo (for obvious reasons).
Hell, if they wanted to they could even run duel displays from one console, allowing you to power more then one TV and the capability to split it into even more screen or more bigger screens. However, they don't - they just want you to be another console and another copy of their game. Don't listen to all the BS about coop not being fun or people growing up, anyone who has done it and not turned into a old turnip knows how fun playing with friends can be when in the same room (or even family).
And if it dies we can never get it back, right?
The correct title would be "Split Screen Co-op Is Out Of Favor"
What about the Wii?
Me and a few friends still occasionally get the multi-tap for the PS2 and sit down for a good game of nightfire all night but it's getting increasingly hard to find games that support split screen.
Some games say they support up to 4 players on the box but then when you play them they insist on a network connection.
I care not for your karma and your mod points.
Top-shelf games push systems to the limits. If you have split screen you have to render and perhaps simulate multiple scenes per video frame. Memory and processing power are scarce resources. If you scale back your graphics then critics and players pan you for having "shit grafix" compared to the other top-shelf title with no split-screen multiplayer and your sales suffer.
While I do agree that the split-screen way of playing is getting a little dated. I know I've certainly never enjoyed playing that way (too distracting and hard to follow who is playing what some times and some games), I do not agree that we are seeing the end of the LAN party and face-to-face interaction while gaming.
My Tuesday night World of Warcraft gaming group is an example of that.
Every Tuesday, my wife and I and three of our friends meet at our house and we'll to Random Instances and general quests all the while having dinner, trading amusing anecdotes, showing off strange YouTube videos, etc.
And I'm not the only ones who do that. Many in my guild are clusters of friends who LAN party at their friends houses. There is the Texas Cluster, the Washington State cluster and there's us which is the Maryland cluster. We have the scattered ones, but that's 15 people (three groups of five) who enjoy an online game as a personal interactive experience with real people under the same roof.
So is it as dead or as dying as the article says, or is it in a state of evolution? A change into something a little different than we're traditionally used to?
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
Some of my best times playing WoW was with a friend and his laptop at my place (or my laptop at his place). We'd get a case of beer and play WoW for the evening. It was fun to be able to laugh and joke with the other player in the same room. It was much more interesting than playing at home by myself.
There is something to be said for having friends in the same room.
That's pretty much the bottom line of it.
The ancient ones here might remember the days when we hauled our computers to each other (provided the other one had a TV that could handle SCART or whatever odd way of connection that computer supported) and connected through serial cables to play the (mostly rather half-baked) multiplayer versions of certain games. Ten years later, it was LAN parties where we lugged computer, monitors steering wheels and ZIP drives towards each other (to exchange various ... umm... christmas videos of each other and ... umm... speeches, yeah) and connected through a hub or (the more professional ones) switches to play.
Of course, splitscreen didn't require you to haul anything more than your ass about, but it still meant to leave the basement and head over to a friend's where you'd play at, well, half a screen. Or a quarter thereof.
Let's be blunt here, it's simply more comfortable to call a friend and instead of telling him to come over 'cause you want to whip his ass in some beat-up game to go online and whip him that way. Also spares him the humiliating taunts when you do so.
Or spares you, depends...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
When you grow up, you find that you have less time for gaming.
What about the new kids being born every second? Or are they too busy with their iProids?
The irony is that television screen size and resolution have finally reached the level where split screen games provide a reasonable gaming experience.
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I'm not surprised split-screen gaming is dying when you take a look at the modern day TV. I used to love going to my mates place and playing mariokart splitscreen on their large rear projection TV. These days we have a plasma screen about the same size as their's back then, but you know what, 16:9 is not a ratio that really lends itself to being split horizontally. Also the result of splitting it vertically gives you zero peripheral vision. Modern TVs are simply not the ideal ratio for split screen gaming, and I'm thankful for the way co-op games seem to find their way around it (Super Mario Wii, Donkey Kong Returns, Wii Sports etc). It's in my opinion a nicer more intuitive way to play. Mind you won't work well on a first person shooter.
I used to set up local LAN parties for Halo and the like but that took a lot of effort. Moving the TV's together and getting additional machines etc. Online multiplayer is just much more convenient and I dont have to deal with my boys woman bitchin' at him leaving the house she seems content to let him play as long as hes home lol. I play CODBO religiously with my 'clan' but we hardly take it seriously but its fun to watch people who do. I will admit though that when a ego gets bruised tempers flare and things are said but thats all part of the fun. What gaming needs is more individual experiences like Spec-Ops in MW2, Army of One and Gears of War 4 player coop is also appreciated by I really like the partner experience.
When you dislike the human race as much as I do, Karma:Bad is inevitable lol.
The guy who wrote this article clearly has no friends anymore. My friends and I have a massive LAN party every friday night. Upwards of 2 dozen PC's, 3 or 4 360's, 3 or 4 PS3's. There is everything from MVC2 running on MAME, to SF4 to Counter-Strike to Unreal Tournament 2k6, and even some Worms(Holy hand Grenade FTW). VPN into the LAN party is sometimes accepted depending on the event, but generally, you gotta show up. It's a ton of fun cramming between 12 and 36 people into a small 800 square foot 2 bedroom apartment and beating the crap out of each other or blowing each other up. I've said for years that nothing brings friends closer together then blowing each others heads off. Yelling and screaming, betting and losing, 1 on 1 grudge matches, what else could anyone want? Local MP/Co-Op is NOT dead, it has just evolved into something different. We've had LAN parties for years with PC's but now with consoles in the mix, it has simply changed from 2-4 players to dozens.
I never found the appeal of having my screen quartered or halved and given some fucked up aspect ratio. Multiplayer on the same fucking screen or go networked w/ multiple screens. I'm sorry but Halo, and GoldenEye both sucked ASS in half/quarter screen multiplayer. Well Halo just sucked ass in general, go find some Mac happy Marathon fanbois and ask them why, oh wait, they killed themselves when Bungie willingly bent over for the M$ assraping.
There are quite a few Wii games that involve many players on the same screen. While perhaps not "split screen" it's still multiple players on the same screen.
Borderlands.
That's why most indie games released lately do it? Alien Breed and Crash time too.
side scrolling CO-OP is better then split screen.
As far as games for Christmas presents, I bought ONLY local co-op games. Anything that didn't have it went back on the shelf. Not interested in buying multiple systems just to play games with the family. Sure, not everyone has a family, but there's a lot of us nonetheless.
Bought games for the WII and X360. Am not paying again to have the PS3 fixed. (Old thick version, what an overheating pile of junk)
BTW: Lego Harry Potter (We had to 'liberate' my boys present early) is pretty cool, once you get used to the change in (I dunno what to call it - controller mechanics?) the way you do stuff (As compared to the other Lego games). I like it, but it threw me for a loop at first, being different from the other Lego games. Less button mashing, and more just holding the button(s) down.
do the arcades there have alot pinball games?
Happy memories of playing that game split-screen with my little brother. The best bit was the day he finally worked out that there were no oil slicks, potholes, pile-ups or any of the other rubbish I would enter as my name so he'd see "OIL SLICK AHEAD" when he got close :D
Boooooo! This is like the new definition of being social.... being glued to your phone and subscribed to as many social networks as possible rather than actually being with those people.
Whoever is on the most and/or has the most friends wins! GOGOGO!
It's like promotion for the single player game. Someone who comes over and is coaxed into a bit of multiplayer might end up buying the game for themselves so they can experience the single player of a game they might not have otherwise been interested in.
I doubt anybody remembers Silicon Knights' Xbox 360 title Too Human, but I played the crap out of that game. It was a sweet hack 'n slash action-RPG with lots of loot to collect, and it really would have benefited from local 2-4 player coop and a longer campaign. What did we get instead? 2 player coop via Xbox Live.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
So is a LAN party, and it's more intellectual brother, the demoparty.
I live in the same country as Slashdot, and it doesn't have demoparties, you insensitive clod! All it has is the Demo-cratic Party.
And that is in casual games. IMO games like Mario Kart, are perfect for the split screen, they are simple from a game play stand point, and are graphically pretty simple, making it easier to not look at the backgrounds.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
3D Glasses tech can be used to display two simultaneous full screen images.
There are still many among us with real life friends and family. Split screen gaming always sucked, however.
Also, Wii.
I was playing multiplayer games on my Intellivision (1979) and even before that on my Coleco Combat (1977) which both had two players. Coleco Combat only had a 2 player mode since the hardware was so primitive. Console games were never meant to cutting edge but cheap and fun. Even the modern consoles were either sold at a lose or not HD to save money. Consoles are cheap computer with a lot video hardware to make them look pretty.
(why would you spend money on a nice huge screen just so you can split it by two or four, again?)
Three reasons:
If nobody wants to make money on split screen or coop gameplay, I am sure Nintendo and friends is more than happy to have the entire market for themselves.
Which is a bad thing for indie developers, as Nintendo is still officially unfriendly to nontraditional business structures. The most indie-friendly console maker is currently Microsoft.
I was disappointed when I got Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit and found out that it didn't support local multiplayer. I wouldn't have bought the game if I had known that. Yes, I could have checked, but given the fact that every Need for Speed game that I have bought in the past was multiplayer, it didn't even dawn on me that it might not be. Lesson learned. Perhaps, as more people realize this, video game manufacturers will lose sufficient sales to encourage them to put local multiplayer back in.
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
Of Course this is just it. The older you get, the more kids you have, the more you like playing CO-OP with your kids, or split screen.
I love Metal Arms on old Xbox, so much fun. 4 player split screen and everyone can actually enjoy it.
DW Gundam is pretty cool on 360.
I suppose the Wii shows that COOP, PEOPLE SITTING IN SAME ROOM is a dead art form. (Sarcastically I wrote this for those humor impaired).
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
For racing games you'd think it's an unavoidable fact, but try and find a split-screen racer on the PS3. GT5 supports it, but that's not really arcadey (i.e. approachable for a group in the same room who may not be racing nerds).
As I understand it, PLAYSTATION 3 consoles can play games designed for the original PlayStation. These include arcade-style racers such as Lego Racers and Crash Team Racing.
Who needs split screen to play Rock Band with friends?
As Ambiguous Puzuma pointed out, Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Hero, and Rock Band are like Tetris: they split the screen down the middle.
Donkey Kong Country, GoldenEye, Halo, Mario Kart, Twisted Metal, arcade beat-em-ups, arcade rail shooters
You might notice that all these are major-label games. There aren't a lot of well-known indie games supporting sharing one screen. There's Trine and what else?
Why design a completely separate UI for the occasional split-screen battle (or quad-view Goldeneye session) when you can just create one dedicated single-user networked multiplayer mode that doesn't suck?
Because you want to promote your product for use at parties that are more spontaneous than a LAN party. Or because your game's genre is far more sensitive to network lag and less amenable to prediction than a typical first-person shooter, such as fighting games.
I'm not aware of any two-person FPS PC games which use a split-screen method
First-person shooters and real-time strategy aren't the only genres.
PCs have never really lent themselves well to having multiple players on the same system.
This was true until 1998, when pre-USB PCs had only one game port, and to a lesser extent until 2005, when PCs lacked TV output as a standard feature. But it changed in 2006, when the middle of the TV market changed from CRT SDTVs to LCD HDTVs. Pretty much all new TVs have inputs compatible with PC video. For example, my Vizio VX32L has pure HDMI, HDMI + analog audio for use with DVI cables, and VGA + analog audio. Dell even sells a GameCube-sized PC called the Zino for home theater PC use. So now I can see no excuse for PC game developers not to support home theater PCs other than wanting to sell multiple copies of each game to each household.
There are too many filthy screen lookers that spend more time looking at your screen to see where you are than they look at their own. That being said, yes I agree that companies want you to buy 2 or more copies of the game instead of playing on the same system.
You mean TCP/IP based multiplayer. You don't need an internet for that, even a local LAN will do. Quake/Unreal Tournament/Half Life/Counterstrike LAN parties were big in college back in the day. And since these games could be started in server mode, you could also look for one of the hundreds of independent hosted servers on the net if no one else was around.
One of my classmates left a permanently running UT server on his high specced desktop, so that anyone on the college network could login and play.
The real reason is that each player requires their own copy of the game (as well as a console and subscription fee if it's a non PC game)
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
How is online multiplayer only more convenient than hanging out with a friend
In the era of IRC and Facebook, it has become more likely that your friend lives in another state or another country. Such a friend doesn't have to pay for airfare and doesn't have to subject himself to TSA gate rape.
You mean TCP/IP based multiplayer. You don't need an internet for that, even a local LAN will do.
So you want to join a LAN party. Good luck with that:
Laptops are more common than desktops
By "laptops" do you mean laptops with AMD or NVIDIA graphics capable of playing a 3D video game more than 10 years old, or do you mean the on-board Intel chipset whose GMA is comparable to the GeForce 3 in an Xbox from 2001? When someone buys a laptop for homework and Facebook, especially when Mom buys laptops for the kids, I've seen that it's usually the latter.
And some people do take them around to eachother
Only when they actually plan on gaming. Otherwise, if people are already at a party and get an itch to game, "let me go home and get my laptop" kills the mood.
quick game of starcraft.
You chose well when you chose to mention the original StarCraft, as it's one of the few PC games with spawn installation. LAN parties don't work if one player has a Call of Duty game and the other player has an Unreal game.
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1912006&cid=34613500
No-one hauled any gear over for split-screen co-op. Young people still go round each other's houses and would often end up playing split-screen co-op because the option was available.
Yes, but the original post was mentioning things that were a bit more involved than that. Two TVs for some team vs team, LAN parties, ...
According to your flowchart, if I like video games, especially indie games, I should make my next PC a gaming PC instead of a homework-and-Facebook PC. But if I have local friends, I should buy a Wii. What should I buy if I like indie games but also have local friends?
Nintendo's requirement of mutual registration of friend codes makes it next to impossible for sexual predators to use its console as a platform to reach your children. It's a preventive measure to prevent a pedophile scandal. What measure would you have used instead? Would you have just banned anybody under age from online play and concentrated on the college market, as some PC game developers do?
I loved the Baldur's Gate and Dungeon Heroes games of the original Xbox. The Xbox360 never got any of those games (the marvel ones were not as fun, I want a good 4 player dungeon crawler.)
My finance and I live together and both love video games. We've also found it a challenge to find good local co-op games for Xbox360. After Borderlands, Castle Crashers and a few others, there really isn't much out there. It's too bad, because it's something we really enjoy and since we try to spend a good chunk of our free time together, it means we'll be playing fewer games, not more.
its a new game created on the UDK editor, take a look its got what you are missing and is definently getting my $20 when it comes out. its going to be a wonderful game so its not dying, its just rare
Cramed together on one couch, with a little 9% view of the world, at less than TV resolutions, and the fact that the others could cheat by looking at the screen made for a misserable experience.
Wide screen 1080p TVs help, but it still sucks. Consoles would do well to update their graphic cards so that they can support 4 seperate screens or at least 2. With as cheap as TV's and monitors are these days and the graphic cards to drive them, they are going to get rolled when console games go back to the PC with it's massive hardware specs.
The excuses by developers for widely varrying PC hardware are dead, Valve is a strong argument for that.
Throw together a hex coure machine with a chunk of ram, four monitors, four controller set ups, and a decent video card and it could run four copies of a game at the same time.
I find that people enjoy non-split-screen multiplayer games much better. For example, Rock Band
Rock Band is split screen, just like DDR or Tetris: each player gets a vertical slice.
Almost all my friends carry around laptops anyway.
Are they gaming laptops, or are they homework-and-Facebook laptops with an Intel GMA whose performance is comparable to the GeForce 3 in the original Xbox according to a chart at Tom's Hardware Guide? And do they carry the laptops everywhere they go?
It's entirely possible to have multiple displays in the same room. Ever heard of a LAN party?
Yes. Please see my other comment about four downsides of LAN parties.
How many games have 16 players playing cooperatively?
I can think of a few, but they're all PC MMORPGs.
I know very few people who don't own a computer
Just because you own a homework-and-Facebook PC with an Intel GMA doesn't mean you own a gaming PC. Nor does it mean you own an HDTV (a lot of families still use SDTV), or a second gaming PC to put next to the TV.
Split-screen multiplayer was a hack
Bomberman, Street Fighter, and Smash Bros. don't need to split the screen.
If you scale back your graphics then critics and players pan you for having "shit grafix" compared to the other top-shelf title
Then don't scale back unless the player chooses a split-screen mode. Any 3D game worth a darn uses lower levels of detail for faraway objects. The game could use lower LOD when split. Besides, not all genres need to split the screen in multiplayer: look at fighting games.
Some past Slashdot articles have claimed that video gaming is stagnating due to the major labels, and only indies can save the industry. But with indies being limited to PCs, and PCs being limited to single-player, LAN multiplayer, and online multiplayer, shared-screen co-op stagnates along with the console cartel that controls it.
You have any idea how hard it is to play first person shooters on a split screen when you like to play like a sniper with hit and run tactics while playing?
That always bugged the crap out of me trying to play halo with my friends cause they couldn't help but look at your screen while you were both playing and using YOUR screen to dodge your sniper shots and triangulate your position by looking how they were running on your screen.
Split-screen is fine for run-n-gun players but it makes snipers games 100 times harder trying to shoot someone who knows when to duck, jump, strafe or just stop running for a split second cause your cross-hairs are almost on top of them. Or the games where you can lay land mines and every time you put one down and the sound effect is played, all the other players look at your screen to see what to avoid.
It's certainly true that many games have dropped local split-screen coop, but then you have World of Keflings, which rightly adds local split-screen coop, something the original (A Kingdom of Keflings) should have had. So it's not all going the wrong direction. Racing games typically have split-screen, some better then others (I believe Blur has 4-player split screen, and of course Mario Kart Wii has 4-layer split-screen, as does Sonic & Sega All Stars Racing). So there's games out there that have it. What's missing from many of *those* though, is the ability to play online with multiple local players. Mario Kart Wii has it (albeit 2 players only). Thankfully Bomberman Live Battlefest (and it's previous version) has this feature in all it's glory, but most games do not. We ought to be getting the best of both worlds. Split-screen (or shared-screen) local players playing online together.
--- What?
When I was in my 20's, we used to head over to a friend's condo every friday night for game night. Usually 10 - 12 of us. There were two Xboxes set up in different rooms for Halo as well a card and board games for those not in to video games and we had a lot of fun. Fast forward 10 years and most are married with kids. Getting out of the house or organizing such events are nearly impossible. Several of us have moved off because of work, but I still get to play Reach with a few of them over Xbox Live on a sunday afternoon.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
LAN PARTIES !!!!!
Perhaps you're from the US
You guessed correctly. I have relatives whose budget is such that they replace a worn-out TV with a used SDTV from a pawn shop, charity shop, or more wealthy family friend replacing an SDTV with an HDTV, instead of buying a new HDTV. Besides, the general public believes PCs are for desks; just because you own a PC and an HDTV doesn't mean you have a second PC to put next to the HDTV.
Yes, there are those that can't afford a new TV but very few of those seem to play video games.
Children still in school can't afford a new TV due to child labor bans, and their mother has money only for a used SDTV.
One moment here, maybe the industry is right. Think of it like this, most of us are offended or shocked by this beginning to occur more and more often, but "we" aren't the norm. We're essentially a community of gamers and nerds, who largely grew up the same. Most of us loved a Goldeneye all nighter, or lining up tokens to have the next crack at Mortal Kombat, but that's our youth and what our generation loves. If you were 13 then and were really in to it, think about today's 13 year olds. EVERYTHING is a social network type experience. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, XBL, PSN, WOW, and on and on.
I'm not saying I like it, damn, I hate it. My friends and I still setup multiple PS3s and tvs just to play MW2 and get that old feel. However, video games are big business, and these companies have market strategy departments funded by more money than some small countries have in GDP. They are going to follow modern trends, and I hate to say it, but that's what's hot. Sure, we say it was better in our day, but that argument has been going on about all entertainment mediums, such as music, since the first instrument was ever played. I'm sure my grandfather would take hoop and stick or lawn darts over Super Mario Brothers. Its just a companies selling to a well thought out target market. As much as we all loved it, our time is likely passing. The world just won't get off our collective lawn!
Just go ahead and complain; there are some of us "old enough" to remember those days who never really even got the point to that kind of gaming.
It amounted to taking turns on the NES or Atari. No thanks.
LAN gaming still happens. Not as often as it once did, I imagine, but it does happen.
Split screen does as well, thanks to CoD. It's a lot of fun to play that with a couple guys in a room...
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
PS3s are no longer backwards compatible, so you can't just throw in your old PS1 discs.
I thought Sony had cut back-compat for PS2 games but kept it for PS1 games. Unlike PS2 back-compat, PS1 back-compat on the PS3 has always been purely in software, probably using a source port of the same emulator that PS1 games on PSP use.
PS3 [...] Wii [...] The indie game scene has picked up the slack to a certain extent
How does one even play an indie co-op video game? Are they for PC or a console? Sony and Nintendo aren't big fans of non-traditional business structures, and most PC monitors aren't big enough for several players to fit around.
New Super Mario Bros
Borderlands
Left4Dead2
Fable3
Dead Nation
Castle Crashers
Scott Pilgrim
Little Big Planet2
There's hardly a shortage of good co-op games to play. I'm not sure what the author is thinking.
I rarely play on a console unless I'm playing a game like Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 with a friend on splitscreen. I prefer PC's for online gaming and I avoid games populated almost entirely by 12-year old brats like COD (at least most teenagers can't afford a gaming PC). Some of my most memorable moments in gaming the past few years were in my friend's living room eating pizza, drinking vodka, and killing zombies. ("Hey, keep that fire away from my vodka!")
First-person shooters and real-time strategy aren't the only genres.
Who mentioned RTS?
You didn't. I brought it up preemptively because people who post comments to other articles relating to PC vs. console and split-screen vs. LAN party often drag out RTS as an example of a genre that can't be done well except at a LAN party or online.
Army of Two: The 40th Day is a pretty underrated game in my opinion. Playing through the game in split screen is quite fun.
Game of the Year.
Made a $1,000,000,000 in 45 days.
Maybe it's not the primary selling point of the game, but I see a good amount of split-screeners online.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
TV's get bigger, can support a higher resolution, yet they stop making split screen games.
Now we have social everything. We are supposed to be interconnected, yet, they are making it so you need to do multiplaying online, instead of having some friends over and kick butt in your living room.
Of course, it's all about the game producers selling more copies, instead of having people just play on 1 copy (even though, chances are, the peeps have the same game at home).
Seriously fuck up priorities these days.
Be seeing you...