I really can’t even begin to describe just how attached I was to my DS. Short of playing a borrowed Gameboy way back when, the DS was the first handheld gaming device I owned. And man, did I OWN it. That little white box went everywhere with me. It became the savior of public transportation, a willing companion on any journey, and my knight in shining plastic. I rented, bought, and sold back dozens of DS games over the course of several years. And for a couple of those years, I definitely favored its games over those on any console. But though our connection was swift, our breakup was even faster. With a change in life and commuting, and less time to game generally, the DS went to a young and very excited family member. Will I be able to “borrow” the DS for my island? Will I be able to choose only five games? Read on…oh yes…read on.
When I added video games to my many geeky hobbies, I never realized how easy it is to watch your game collection go from one or two games to ten or twenty games piled high in a corner.
My gamer friends have told me there are maybe just a handful of games they completed in full, while the rest are left partially started or not started at all. Despite knowing this, they all can’t resist the urge to buy more games as the newest, hottest titles continue to come out every year.
Collecting games, like you collect baseball cards or a stamp collection, was a foreign concept to me. In my opinion, it made more sense to finish a game you already owned first before buying a new one, or waiting for a price drop so the game is cheaper to purchase. I naively thought how silly it was to keep buying more and more games until you couldn’t keep up. I eventually caught on that the urge to collect more games is a lot stronger than one might think.
Why is that? Why do gamers want to have more games in their possession than they can actually play in a day? A week? Or even a month? What I discovered from my friends and from my own experience is if a game has been reviewed highly and looks cool after watching the game trailers, we will buy it.
We are easily swayed by awesome graphics, a fun or different gameplay system, and the story. It may also be the latest, hottest title everyone is currently playing. You want to be among the cool kids playing what everyone else is currently playing. You want to trade stories of how this boss fight was epic or discuss what that shocking ending meant. It could also be a way of avoiding spoilers faster if you get the game the day of its release.
Personally, I don’t buy too many games the day it’s released. I’m a bargain shopper by nature and I really don’t see the point of throwing down $40 or $50 on a single game, even if it’s one of the best games to come out in a month or year. I also have to really want a game that badly to get it on the first day or week of it coming out (I’m looking at you Dragon Age 3). I’m content with waiting until the price drops a bit or when there’s a sale. Once I do see the game I’ve been dying to get for a while go on sale, there’s no holding me back from buying it straightaway.
This also brings me to another reason why we seem to accumulate so many games––price drops and sales are our best and worse friend in the world. During holiday shopping seasons, I’ve seen a good number of the newly released games go on sale at decent prices from the regular. It calls out to me like a Siren’s song. Before I know it, I’m whipping out my credit card and hitting purchase before I even have a chance to figure out what just happened. It’s also comforting to know a game is in my possession, waiting for me to play it when I’m ready.
I also think we can’t help but collect more games because we want the available option of playing it when we want to. This has happened to me recently when I was trying to figure out what to play, but didn’t feel like playing the current game I’m trying to finish. “You know, I don’t feel like playing anymore Fire Emblem Awakening right now. What should I play instead? Oh, let me start playing Telltale’s The Walking Dead. I haven’t tried it yet and I’m in a story driven game kind of mood.”
If I didn’t have The Walking Dead among my piles of games, and I wanted to play it, there isn’t much I can really do about it other than to choose a game I have already beaten but has a high replay value, like Mass Effect, to satiate my urge for a story based game.
There’s this desire to want to play everything when realistically we can only play so much. For some of us, we have summer vacations from school where you can have a marathon gaming session and reduce your building backlog. For the rest of us who are working adults and have responsibilities in the real world, our time isn’t what it used to be. We’re lucky if we can carve an hour or two of our time to play a level here and there. Backlogs for us is just a reminder that we may never get around to playing everything, despite our best intentions to try.
I think I’m okay with knowing this. As one good friend said to me recently, to comment on his monster size backlog, “When I die, maybe I’ll just have my consoles and games buried with me. I can play them in the afterlife.” Not a bad idea.
I had a poignant relationship with our Gamecube. We had some absolutely wonderful times together, filled with sailing, slaying, and sleuthing. But it also rendered one of my biggest gaming disappointments in the form of Super Mario Sunshine. (I tried, I really did, but it turned out to be one of the few Mario titles that just didn’t resonate with me. And that made me very sad. However, spoilers, I try to rectify things as you’ll see below.) I had very few titles for the system, which made making choices both easy and hard. Some were shoe-ins, while other required a good bit of mental debate. Among some of our stored electronics, our Gamecube still sits. Waiting for its chance at resurrection! (Or, morbidly so, the death of the Wii.)
Of all the systems I plan to cover during this series, the N64 is probably the system I loved the most. I received the system as a gift in the late 90s. With nothing but an ailing SNES at the time, it was the greatest gift I could have received. Through the N64 I experienced a gaming renaissance; and with a Blockbuster nearby that offered game rentals, well…let’s just say I was a very happy camper. As satiated with games as I was back then, on this here island, I can only have up to five games. That was a dumb rule make. Dumb rules!
As a solitary, curmudgeonly gamer with control issues who doesn’t get out much, I don’t have a million and one stories involving co-op play in games. In the early days, my siblings and I used to hand off SNES controllers to play rounds with Mario, which is one form of co-op play, but not the kind I’m thinking of here. In terms of actually having to cooperate with other players to help everyone make it through a game, I can really only remember two such experiences. Yep, two instances of cooperative play in which I took part. And one was probably my worst experience ever with a game, and the other was near the top of my favorite experiences. Let’s start with the bad news first.
In many modern video games, there is an option to design the main character from the ground up using a robust creation system. For some players, this is an excuse to create the most ridiculous hero ever (eight feet tall and purple hair, yes please), but more often than not, people want to put themselves into the action. It makes sense: video games provide experiences that are wholly unlike real life, so of course you would want an avatar of yourself performing these amazing feats. But the option to create a virtual self is not always available, particularly in the co-op multiplayer games of old.
Back in the saccharine days of the 1990s, when the video arcade was still alive and kicking, huge cabinets provided four players the opportunity to punch and kick their way across cartoon landscapes. Animated shows like The Simpsons and X-Men were riding high, and their arcade counterparts were the featured titles at every gaming establishment across the United States. And at the top of every kid’s playlist sat Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game. This show (and its respective games) had it all: ninjas, martial arts, skateboarding, and of course, pizza. There was just one problem when it came to actually playing the game with four people: deciding which turtle to play as.
Oh sure, it may seem like an easy decision (Leonardo, duh), but what happens when you have four kids and all of them identify with a katana-wielding do-gooder? You can’t all be the leader – that just wouldn’t make sense. As with so many other co-op arcade games, hard introspection and tough decisions about one’s character had to be made. Several of my trips to Chuck E. Cheese would progress as follows:
“Okay guys, which turtle are you? I am really nerdy and I like to build with Legos, so I should be Donatello.”
“Wait a minute, I like those things too, and I am wearing a purple shirt, so I should be Don!”
“Fine, fine, fine. Well, Cory should be Leonardo, since it’s his birthday.”
“But I don’t wanna be Leo, I like Michelangelo! He has numb-chucks.”
“It’s nun-chucks, stupid! Fine, then I will be Leonardo, Cory can be Michelangelo, Jeremy can be Donatello, and Corey, you’ll be Raphael.”
“Nuh-uh! I am not gonna be Raph, he sucks!”
“Well someone has to be Raph!”
This would go on for some time, until one of us would just break the argument and pick our favorite character before anyone else had the chance. It seemed like every co-op arcade experience went like this until each of us had settled into our roles. For me, I became the grappler/support of the team. My roster was made up of characters like Haggar, Lisa, Nightcrawler, and Ryan, while my brother would take the leading roles of Cody, Bart, Cyclops, and Alex. We had learned which characters best suited our play styles, but more importantly, we identified with these heroes and our time spent gaming became even more special.
Even though arcades have mostly vanished from the world, the experience of molding yourself to a character is far from extinct. There are several modern co-op games that do not allow players to create an avatar from scratch. When playing Left 4 Dead or Scott Pilgrim Versus the World, my friends and I still have to figure out which character is the best representation of our personalities. Most first-person shooters limit the visual customization options to basic colors and body armor, so players must determine their role in the group using the weapons and tools available. Maybe you are the sniper who stays back and picks off enemies for the team, or perhaps the job of a medic might be a better fit. The choice is yours.
While the arguments and debates over character selection were mostly superficial among my friends, there was a deeper reason for all of it. When you get to the nitty-gritty of co-op gaming, there needs to be less focus on your individual progress and more care put into how you can best help the team. After all, if some jack-ass is stealing all of the pizzas when his/her turtle doesn’t even need health, the rest of the team will suffer. Just like Master Splinter said, “Together, there is nothing your four minds cannot accomplish. Help each other, draw upon one another, and always remember the power that binds you.”
Around the time I got my Xbox 360 a few years ago, I didn’t have an Xbox Live Gold subscription. Friends who had an Xbox and a Gold subscription kept telling me I needed to get one. The reason? You can only play with your friends online if you have a subscription. This was also around the time when I was working at a part-time job and my finances were pretty tight.
Paying for a Gold subscription was quite expensive when you factor in the salary I was earning at the time. It wasn’t like I had no intention of getting one. It was just going to take some time for me to get one. The other issue was I didn’t have too many multiplayer games in my possession either. I wasn’t in any rush to get the subscription. Luckily, I’m blessed with good friends and family. My cousin took it upon himself to buy me a Gold subscription card for Christmas and one of my best friends decided to get me Halo Reach to start me on the path of multiplayer games I could play with both of them. Yup, truly blessed.
I generally like playing games by myself. I want the ability to absorb the story, the game environment, and to just have a quiet moment between me and the game. I knew playing online and on co-op with my friends would be fun, but there are times when you just want to be alone without the distraction of having to talk on a headset while you play. I like paying attention to the dialogue being said in a game, and when you have your friends talking at the same time a character in a game is talking, it’s really hard to stay focused on both. But when I do play co-op, I only want to play with people I know rather than random strangers who are paired up with you in a party match game.
I’m not the best player in the world, and I rather be playing in the company of friends who aren’t asses and judgey about how much I suck at first person shooters. From what I have read of people who do play co-op and are matched with total strangers who are playing the same game as you are, not all players are nice and respectful of other players who may not be as good as they are. Or on the opposite end of the spectrum, you may be a better player than this person from whateverville USA, and they are a sore player because of it and insult you. That’s a separate issue and a different topic for another time though.
Eventually, I did discover how some games are better to play with friends than alone. Take for instance, Borderlands. When I received the game as a gift, I was told by others who have already played the game and completed it that it’s better to play with someone else than on single-player mode. I never had the chance to try it on single-player, but when I managed to get together with maybe one or three of my friends for a game of Borderlands, they were right about it being an infinitely better experience to play as a group than alone.
Large groups of enemies are easier to take on as a group. Whatever your weaknesses are when you play the game, there’s someone who will have your back. Strategies can be built and agreed upon to take bosses down. One person might say, “You distract him by doing this and then I’ll take him from behind when he’s completely trained on you.” There’s also some silliness and goofing around when you play with friends.
I remember one time when I played Borderlands with my cousin, my best friend, and my best friend’s girlfriend. There were points in the game where you could get a vehicle, and my best friend’s girlfriend loved getting a pink car and trolling her own boyfriend by threatening to run his character over. It was hilarious hearing my best friend shout, “No, don’t run me over!” and you see his character running away from the pink car. I would sit in the gunner seat and watch as this craziness was happening before my eyes.
Another friend who I have been finishing up Borderlands with recently told me she never finished the story mode for the first game alone, but she finished it for Borderlands 2. She found the world of Pandora in the first game a bit drab and depressing while she played by herself. It also didn’t help that enemies got too hard to fight against on her own. By having the two of us play together, it made going through the entire story mode easier to do. There were also some funny moments that happened while we played and weird game glitches we experienced together.
I also think an advantage of playing a game that has co-op in their story modes is it makes you more likely to finish a game than if you played it on your own. I can’t tell you how many times I have started games on my own, only to not finish it because I get distracted by other games that keep coming out.
While I wouldn’t trade those moments where I can sit down and play a game by myself, I do enjoy finding a day and time with friends to play co-op. Not only do you get to experience the game together for the first time (or maybe for the twentieth time), but it gives you some good memories you can reminisce over. It’s also the best way to do stupid things with friends you wouldn’t have done otherwise if you are alone.
