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!)