Friday 2 October 2015

Split-Screen Gaming

Some of the best memories I have with my friends involve us playing hours of computer games together, in an attic gaming room where the windows are open and the summer breeze is blowing in. This was all possible due to split-screen games like Goldeneye, Mario Kart and countless other classics.

As I got older I have played games less and work life got in the way, but I always thought I was a little more clued up about the modern gaming world than the average joe. How wrong I was.

Yesterday I went to buy a PS4 and some games for it, but as I browsed through the games I couldn’t help notice how they were all 1 player only. All the fighting games, racing games and shoot-em-ups. Only Fifa was multiplayer. The rest were all network-only multiplayer games.

I was going to buy a PS4 with two controllers but in the end I only got one controller. The shop assistant explained to me that as everything is now online, the split-screen is being removed altogether. When friends play games together now they do so over the network with headsets, and not in each other’s bedrooms high-fiving each other when they complete a mission together. It made me a bit sad actually, as it all seems a bit isolated. I guess that is the way gaming has gone and I’ve completely missed the technology. But give me my N64 and three of my friends in a room any day playing Mario Kart, than hearing them through the headsets hundreds of miles apart.

Maybe I'm being grumpy for no reason, but it's nice if developers kept the option for split-screen gaming there too.    

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