But the game’s best feature was the additional story mode with an actual plot line: to take back control of a tropical island from a giant, intergalactic pig-wizard, you had to defeat him by beating him and his henchmen in a series of races, one of which was on the moon. At its core the game was simply a number of tracks that could be raced via hovercraft, plane or race car (it took until 2011 for Mario Kart to offer that kind of vehicle variety) by you and your friends/family in a multiplayer mode. To me, Rare’s answer to Mario Kart 64 was infinitely better, and no other video game drew my family together more than Diddy Kong Racing. Eric Yang, Editor in Chiefīuy Used: $17 Ken Griffey Jr Presents Major League Baseball Don’t get me wrong, today’s network gaming is great for a lot of people, but I also find it ironic that it’s called “network,” because it seems to me that these days gaming feels more isolated than ever. Games were about league, shit-talking and crashing. Co-op and group gaming were always what made video games, well, games - it’s what we looked for on the box (2-4 player co-op). but I doubt that if you dropped us all into the same room, it wouldn’t take us 15 minutes to dust off an old N64, find the nearest set of RCA jacks, and reach for the controller… with a fully operating analog joystick. Sure, the friends I used to play Goldeneye with have all gone on to bigger things - lobbyists, doctors, scientists, businessmen, ministers, etc. Even as I write that, my spine tingles with finger-twitched nostalgia. Goldeneye ushered in an arc of years for me that, to this day, are simply impossible to forget. GoldeneyeĬold pizza, Coke, heated 2-on-2 basketball session between bleary-eyed rounds. So in remembrance of the days of old, when you could embarrass grandma on the NES without having to explain the intricacies of a controller with more than two buttons, here are our fondest multiplayer games from the childhoods of GP staffers. Graphics and personal experience are the forefront for developers - the next step in gaming, Virtual reality, literally blocks the rest of the world from sight. And with the death of split-screen comes the death of one of the best aspects of gaming: bonding. Now, with essentially every new release except sports games, the only way to play with your friends is to play online, in separate homes, on separate couches, with headsets on the days of playing basketball all day and Mario Kart all night have gone the way of the pogo stick. In 2015, when Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 released, articles were written about the fact that it maintained local multiplayer, since the practice was unsupported by most game publishers, including Halo 5, which was released the same year. But by 2011, when the beautiful and much more complex Battlefield franchise arrived on consoles with Battlefield 3, it brought with it no local multiplayer. Halo 3 (2007) could host 4 players locally. But when graphics improved, consoles suddenly became unable or unwilling to keep up with a split screen. The graphics grew up, becoming so good that my young self would shake in his size-7 Adidas if he saw them. What they do experience are video games that lost something along the way to adulthood. Teens these days will never experience that. Young teenagers, cursing and pimply and crazy with hormones, all lugging desktop computers and monitors into the same room and plugging into a network switch to play locally. Counter Strike: Source had dropped - a game that defined realism in first person shooters. Kids these days will never experience that.įast-forward a few years, and I had my first LAN party. Eight sweaty, yelling kids, all self-conscious and crazy with hormones. We’d set up two back-to-back TV’s (Sunday collections had to go somewhere) and play 4-v-4 locally. I was about 10 years old, so my new friends and I were playing Halo which had recently premiered on the original Xbox. Once a year we’d hold a “lock in,” in which a group of roughly three dozen kids of varying ages, and adults who probably regretted signing up to chaperone, stayed up all night watching movies or playing board games or chatting. I had just moved, so this was essentially my crew, my network and my dinner group. When I was younger I attended youth group at a local Baptist church.
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