Several months ago, we decided to write an article for Co-Optimus. It will come as no surprise that we wrote this together; team work all the way! The article detailed our descent into the warm world of couch Co-op gaming. The peak was fun while it lasted.
Over the last few months, we have come to realize that for our formats of choice (preferences in what genre games we like and most importantly budget), we were running out of co-op creamy goodness. Gears of War 3 was fantastic fun but like the previous two Gears games, we completed it in just under a week, didn't like the multiplayer, and traded it in before we knew what hit us.
When we last left you, we were getting stuck into Battlefield 3 and Saints Row 2 on our then-new dual Xbox 360 setup. But this turned out to be just too much of a headache each evening when we wanted to game, as far as setup was concerned. Moving my Gamer tag to a flash drive every time was a hassle, especially since we have wired controllers and a Kinect, limiting our spare USB ports to zero, other wise it would stay on the flash drive.
My girlfriend never did get the hang of driving in games, which all but killed the Battlefield campaign for her. We were playing dual simultaneous single player, side by side on our respective screens, and she was and still is way more comfortable straight out shooting people than driving. At least we got a good ride out of the multiplayer aspect of the game.
We had the same problem in Saints Row 2; early on we hit a hitch in the driving sections of the game and she just couldn't keep up, so we traded that in also. That was it, we were now out of games we could afford to play. Battlefield 3 and Dead Island still elude us due to the price needed to buy two copies of one game for co-op.
We found our solution by breaking away from our usual co-op team and going it solo. Considering my girlfriend has only played co-op games, there was a whole world of RPGs for her to explore, plus a fair few I wanted to play myself. A quick look around our local game stores turned up a fair few classics at a fraction of the cost of buying some of the new co-op titles like Battlefield 3, so we were saved. (So was some money!)
We've just completed Enslaved: Oddyssey to the West on single player. It's amazing how fun a single player game can be if you just pass the controller between you every twenty minutes or so. Just as you get to the point of "ARGH F*%K THIS GAME" as it punishes you with death, it's time to pass the controller and let your co-op partner show you how it's done.
A superb game it was, too, even more enjoyable that we got to share its story, much like we would when watching a film. It's opened the door to a lot more games for us to play together. We thoroughly enjoyed the Mortal Kombat main story on single player together, but tired of the multiplayer quickly. Now we have Heavenly Sword, Assassin's Creed 1 & 2, Uncharted 1, 2 & 3, God of War 3 and many more delights ready to accept us into their worlds together, albeit with our new co-op twist.
Skyrim, my kind of RPG, broke our team up for a while, so my lady has worked her way through Fable II & III, started Fallout 3, Mass Effect, and others, honing her gaming skills. Our co-op gaming nights (which are pretty much every night) now take many forms:
A quick look through Co-Optimus shows that co-op games are getting few and far between again. Obviously we have played much more than what I have talked about and there are still a few games to come out over this year. Not all of them will be to our taste, though, so it's "work as a team to keep fighting" or "go watch some celebrity nonsense on TV"... ha!
If all else fails, though, we have our "in case of emergency" game, Dungeon Defenders. We love the game to pieces! You could spend weeks leveling up skill points with it, but it's best left for those days when all other co-op games run dry, or we both break a leg and need to sit on our backside all day, which ever comes first.
And so it continues...
[Player 1 Press Start]