Co-Op Gaming, The Good and The Bad

This generation of gaming has an abundance of multi-player gaming. Just jump online with some friends and you can enjoy hours of Super Smash Bros, Call of Duty, Madden or Halo. They're all fun times, but sometimes you want to play the main story with a friend. That kind of co-op play is hard to come by these days.

I know, "I don't have any friends." Is a saying used all that often. Or maybe its, "All my friends have moved away." Though both of these might be true, there are still plenty of people that do have people come over to game with. So it's nice when you can find some quality games to play all in one living room.

I'm currently enjoying my new Wii U. Nintendo took the first plunge into the next generation of gaming. And they are one of the few companies left that try and provide a good multi-player in the same room experience. One prime example is Nintendo Land.

Nintendo Land comes with any deluxe black Wii U, and has 12 total mini-games for people from 1-5 people to enjoy. Most of these games just about anyone can pick up and learn how to play within a minute or two. The lone exceptions might be Metroid Blast and Donkey Kong Crash Course. One of the games, Pikmin Adventure, has become a surprisingly fun game to play with my wife. I didn't expect this to be the case, but the simple controls to use the Pikmin has her wanting to play it when we sit down and game. Just run around, smash things, pick up power ups, and use your new power to smash some more things. It's a bit more complicated than that, but not really. She wishes the game has more levels, and I'm just hoping Pikmin 3 has some elements like this so maybe she'll want to play that whenever it is released. We've only been waiting about five years after all.

The other co-op game we just finished was Little Big Planet 2 on the Playstation 3. The PS3 is not a robust system for co-op games, especially when you have casual people to play with. And despite this game receiving many patches through our play through, none of them have fixed the shoddy controls. I can live with bad controls. I might not like them - but I'll find a way to use them. When you're someone like my wife - a casual gamer - who wants things to just work, then crappy controls don't sit well. We managed to finish the game, but I had to do a lot of it with our final life because either the grapple hook was too hard to understand, the bunnies' inconsistent jumping drove her insane, or because the pastry you throw at the final boss takes a bit too much precision for someone who just wants to hit A. The worst part might have been the the second to last level took us one try. The final level took us two hours.

So game developers, either make your game easy or hard. This goes for co-op or single player experiences. Swift shifts in difficulty can drive anyone insane. And if you want your game to appeal to the masses, then at least do what New Super Mario Bros Wii and U did and provide a bubble-like feature.

Side note: 26 days between posts. Off to a great start I am... New Year's Resolution for sure to post more.

Let's try this again

Over the years I've attempted to do a blog on gaming and sports on multiple occasions. Here's another attempt. As my new job doesn't require writing all that much, I don't feel burned out of typing at the end of the day anymore. And well, I don't want to completely let this skill go to waste. So here I again, I'm going to try and keep up a blog, mostly about video games.

Picked up a  Wii U at a midnight launch a month or so ago, that added to my already mass collection. I also on a 3DS, PS3, Wii, Gamecube, Nintendo 64, NES, DS, Gameboy Advance, Gameboy Color, Gameboy and a Game Gear. And there's the PS2 my brother now has with him. Oh and the gaming PC. All in all I have well over 400 games - documented on my backloggery.com account, XCWarrior there too.

I'll try and give my thoughts on what I'm playing semi-regularly. I'm usually playing about six or seven things at once, so if you don't like the game I'm talking about - come back the next time. Ten to one says I am playing something else on that given day.

Here's to trying to stay committed to this for once.