Nintendo Okie

Multiplayer is all over the place lately.  Some games have it, other don’t.  Some game should have it, other shouldn’t.  I took Ghostbusters: The Video Game over to a friend’s house a couple weeks ago.  I soon found out that the game didn’t have any local multiplayer.  It has a multiplayer mode, is it wrong of me to think that I can play it with the person sitting next to me?  Last week Will, Peter and I wanted to play some Marvel Ultimate Alliance together.  We didn’t get the chance because if you play online, you can only have one person playing per system.  We had three people and two systems.   I can’t tell you how many times this kind of stuff has happened.  When is the last time you played a first person shooter with four people on the same TV?  In recent memory I recall Halo 3 and Red Steel?  (Wow, I never thought I would ever put those games in the same sentence.)  I’m not going to sit here and say all games should have every different form or multiplayer imaginable.  Instead I want to talk about how I like and dislike seeing games handle their multiplayer.

As I mentioned before, there are several different ways to play games together.  The Halo franchise has always been a shining example of how this should work. You want three people on one system playing 2 guys on another?  No problem.  You want to have a four player death match on one screen?  Teh Haloz can do that.  If Bungie was my student, it would get a gold star.  I wish more developers would follow their example.  I realize that Halo is one of the most profitable game franchises ever and that the developers have an insane amount of resources, but Halo: Combat Evolved worked the same way and it was a launch title.

The Conduit is a great game.  I really enjoyed the single player but I admit that I have never played the multiplayer.  This is mostly because nobody else I know bought it.  That wouldn’t have been as big of a problem if the game had a local multiplayer option.  Is it too much to ask that we can relive the “glory days” of GoldenEye 007?  Some would say yes.  From what I have been told, the Wii hardware cannot produce the graphics from The Conduit four times over.  That isn’t a knock against the Wii.  The same holds true for all systems.  But just because developers like High Voltage Software are pushing consoles to their limits, do we have to suffer the curse of no split screen?  I hope not.  I may not know what I am talking about but can’t these graphics engines be programmed to scale down when the screen is split between more than one person?  Resident Evil 5 has a split screen mode along with its high level graphics.  What did Capcom do differently?

I really enjoy how shooters like Perfect Dark Zero add bots into their multiplayer.  It is a nice option to help round out multiplayer functionality.  For some reason, bots don’t seem to make it into games any more.  Maybe I’m just not looking in the right place.  Modes like Fire Fight in Halo 3: ODST and Horde in Gears of War 2 are starting to be prominent in games.  I suppose these capture the spirit of playing humans verses bots but I hope they don’t prove to be a replacement.

Let’s be honest here, the Wii doesn’t do online very well.  Why is that?  Is it a limitation of the hardware or is it software based?  I think Mario Kart Wii proves the hardware is perfectly capable of online play.  Does this mean that every Wii game could have this same online functionality?  Maybe but as I said before, I am not a developer so I can only speculate.  What I do know is that Nintendo is going to have to start laying down some ground rules for online play, as Microsoft and Sony do, if they ever want the Wi-Fi connection to be comparable to the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live.    Can you imagine a world where Super Smash Bros. Brawl has the online functions of Xbox Live?  I’m drooling on my keyboard just thinking about it.

Another game I point to when I think of shining multiplayer examples is Super Mario Galaxy.  I love how the second player can play cooperatively by shooting Star Bits from off screen.  It is a simple enough for one player to handle on their own but still involved enough to keep a second player interested.  It is a creative new twist on multiplayer that I applaud.  I challenge more developers to think outside the box to create new multiplayer functions.  How about a 3D platformer where the second player can control the camera.  It may sound like a bad idea at first but I can see a lot of New Super Mario Bros. Wii style humor come out of it.

Keep in mind that I don’t want a game’s single player aspect to suffer because of multiplayer.  I realize that making a game with single player and multiplayer is the equivalent of making two games.  I just hope when developers decided to make a multiplayer mode, it is because they feel they can create an exciting experience and not because they just want another bullet point on the back of the box.