  As a lot of the multiplayer gaming is taken up these days by playing online, I was missing the experience of simply getting a group of friends around and playing a game all in the same room for hours at a time. You see I am not a big fan of online gaming, I do not like talking on the mic and I feel the experience is extremely lacking without the other people there with you. A lot of the time I feel like I may aswell just be playing against bots.
To that end I thought I would go through some of my personal favourite multiplaying experiences I had growing up. I'll go through these by the consoles I owned at the time.
NES
Super Mario Bros 1+3 - These two I didnt really play multiplayer as such, but they were always a joint effort. I dont really remember playing them on my own as I always had someone over my shoulder watching. This would be a recurring theme on the NES as you will see.
A Boy and His Blob - Hopefully if you read my feature of this game you'll know how much I liked it. What I didnt mention was that my mum and I were the ones who kept trying to complete it. I would play through the game and she would list all the effects of various jelly beans and try and help me through the levels.
McDonaldland - This was another game where my mum seemed to love it just as much as me. We would play for hours trying to get the 'M' cards and working our way through the levels. This time though we did play 2 player. Being able to take turns after each level.
MegaDrive
Streets of Rage 2 - This for me has got to be the best beat'em up I have ever played. I always played as Skate and my friend has Axel (bastard never let me try him!). We'd fight our way through to Mr X having a great time doing it. Then within a few weeks of completing it, we'd be right back to playing through again. We never seemed to get bored of it.
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie - Yes, I realise this is basically just a copy of Streets Of Rage which I mentioned directly above, but its part of my multiplaying history so I am adding it damn it! Being a big Power Rangers fan this was a no brainer to be honest, I was pretty much always going to love it but I think it actually stood out quite well on its own by adding the normal fights then using megazords at the end of some levels to mix things up a bit.
Street Racer - While other people played Super Mario Kart on their Super Nintendo's I was playing Street Racer with my friends. I may be in a minority here but I still prefer it to Nintendo's giant to this day.
PlaystationVigilante 8 - Such a brilliant driving game, my favourite of the car combat games. Got very frustrating though for one member of my group of friends....I think thats just because he wasnt very good at it though! WWF Smackdown 2 - Before Smackdown 2 most of my wrestling games were on the N64 but this one just seemed to get everything write. The controls, graphics, storymode, create a wrestler and multiplayer seemed perfect at the time. Final Fantasy VII - Before you all start yelling at me, I know FFVII didnt have a multiplayer mode but it was another one of those games we played as if it was both of us controlling Cloud. We had rules that we would not play the game unless the other person was present and thats how it actually went, to my amazement. Nintendo 64Perfect Dark - For a lot of people, Goldeneye was their multiplayer choice for the N64. Not for me, infact I didnt like the multiplayer in it much at all. Perfect Dark however managed to keep my interest, probably because the weapons were so interesting. I would love to set up the laptop gun or sit camping somewhere with the amazingly over-powered farsight gun and just shoot people through the walls!
Im sorry to say I didnt play the N64 when it was originally out as I would have liked to so I cant really add anymore to this list from that console. Except of course a Track and Field game but thinking about it now I cannot remember what its name was.
I'll stop here as from what I remember, my multiplaying started to lessen after I took more of an interest in single player games.
Dont forget, this is just a list of my own personal multiplaying history so the reason I left out some obvious games and even consoles was that I just didnt play them until later on.
Labels: Features, Multiplayer, Retro |
