Sharing the Pain: The Life of a Co-op Gamer

I have been gaming for quite some time, my father had (either atari or commodore) and he bought a Nintendo for my older brother when he was 2 years old. It is not an exaggeration to say that I’ve been exposed to games since I was born. However, as I mentioned, I have an older brother. With one system and one TV, we had to learn to share, and settle on games that both of us wanted. It was even tighter in the early years when my dad still wanted his turn to play. From Altered Beast to The Warriors, virtually all of my gaming memories from kindergarten up until he left for college are cooperative.

Now that’s not to say that all we had were cooperative games. We weren’t so stubborn as to avoid the countless great games over the years that didn’t have cooperative modes. Instead, we found ways to make single player games cooperative. I will share these in the hopes of expanding the range of games that you co-op gamers out there can enjoy. We had different skills, so we could pick up each other’s slack, in action or platforming games this usually happened by trading off on deaths. RPGs were split up by calling characters, we’d each have characters that we had absolute say over. Hell we even played the Harvest Moon games co-op, we’d divide the tasks and management. I still remember my brother’s friend Ben sitting on the bed writing up a 2 year financial plan for our fictional farm as my brother ordered around our pack of magical, unpaid, farmhands, and I tracked what was needed for the upcoming social events. Fighting games with any kind of tag element are perfect for co-op, as long as you have quick hands when your partner switches or gets knocked out. Strategy games can be played co-op in a couple of ways. Over the shoulder advising can be immensely helpful and irritating at the same time, someone else may notice something you miss or they might just yell out suggestions wholly incompatible with your style. There’s also our unorthodox favorite, everyone bring your towers over and go online for some pickup games. The amount of coordination possible when everyone is in the same room may be unfair but I’ll be damned if it isn’t fun too. Most of these suggestions are pretty oldschool but I find they’re still handy when you’re strapped for cash and still want to do some co-op. Now with increased online gaming and distance we’ve had to change the way we play co-op…mostly.

As the years have gone on there have been co-op games but not nearly as many as the competitive or single-player games. This may be a product of the co-op dynamic me and my brother have built over the years but we are very forgiving of any faults of a game if it includes good co-op. We forgave those ridiculous linked collars in Destroy All Humans 2 because we got to lay waste to cities as a team. Games like Borderlands, Kane and Lynch, and the Gears of War series would be unremarkable on the merits of their story (or lack thereof in the case of Borderlands and Gears of War) and gameplay but having someone at your back to share the experience with goes a long way. However, this isn’t a free pass to tack on poor co-op or make single system co-op unbearable to force people to buy more copies. I mean I bought my own copy of Call of Duty World at War, Borderlands, and Resident Evil 5 because for some reason they butchered the simple process of dividing the screen. I recognize a company’s right to take more money from me for a co-op experience, but don’t tempt me with single system co-op and then drive me to get my own through disgust. If your single system co-op is going to be terrible or if your split screen is going to remove 1/3 of each player’s screen for absolutely no reason, then don’t waste the time and the resources making it. Which brings me to my thoughts on online co-op.

I am very thankful for online co-op as it has allowed my preferred method of gaming to continue despite any distance between me and my friends and family. However, I play virtually exclusively with people I know, so I can’t wrap my head around playing co-op games with strangers. In my experience the online gaming world is overrun with foulmouthed, selfish, petty, children and the idea of putting my life in their hands makes about as much sense as setting my clothes on fire because they’re dirty, in a way I’ve resolved my problem but is my new situation any better? I’m more than tolerant of stupid behavior in a co-op game. As any co-op gamer knows, there’s the endless fun of acting out any friction with your partner through timely betrayal. I have many fond memories of splitting my brothers head open in Halo (Combat Evolved, before the series jumped the psychic squid that speaks in trochaic heptameter) when he took ammo for my favorite gun…or when he blew up my ghost…or when he was just asking for it by turning his back to me. But this behavior is only acceptable because there is an existing relationship, that and the potential for immediate or future physical retribution. Whenever I bashed my brother I fully expected to get thrown over and/or into something, or if time was a factor, to be socked in the jaw. I can’t joke around with a random player, I don’t know what might set them off, and I honestly wouldn’t want to push my luck beyond them being halfway competent and not constantly spewing a stream of nonsensical racial slurs. For me co-op gaming is about doing something with people I have fun with, more than half the fun of co-op games is the company.

I would say without reservation that my greatest co-op experience that can be considered remotely recent was Tales of Symphonia. It took a bit of time for us to figure out how co-op worked but once we did it was everything we had been waiting for, action combat with inter-teammate assists and a genuine RPG system. Even though Tales of Symphonia had such a genuinely enjoyable co-op system it did not sacrifice story or aesthetic. It was so enjoyable that our third party member stuck it out right through the end despite *SPOILER ALERT* the loss of his favorite character and his temporary replacement with a pink vested douchebag in a belly shirt *SPOILER OVER*. Now you would think that a character like that could ruin the game but the truth is that all the characters were real, cliché at times, but real. The person’s personality makes sense given circumstances and their relationships within the story you can’t expect to like every character within a story anymore than you can to like every person you meet. The closest thing I have to a complaint about this game is that the computer was too good at playing as the healer, there was no need for a fourth player. In fact a fourth could be a hindrance given how completely that game consumed us. I recall one occasion, we were on maybe the twelfth hour of another all day binge of that magnificent game. Our cousin was filling the fourth seat and was a perfectly competent healer, despite his tendency to waste juice on his feeble attack spells due to boredom. In the middle of a particularly crucial battle we noticed that we had all just stopped getting healed, as one we turned to the right to see what was wrong with our healer. He had the controller firmly grasped in his hands but his head was slumped backwards and his mouth was wide open with a trail of drool leaking out, our healer had fallen asleep at the damn helm. A swift blow to the stomach brought him round but we learned an important lesson: if you’re going to put someone in a pivotal role make sure they share your degree of commitment/obsession. Now only the combat in Tales of Symphonia had everyone playing, at all other times the control was in player one’s hands. Which is fine if the story is enough to keep the other players engaged, except when player one has the navigational skills of a lobotomized messenger pigeon. I don’t know what it was about that game, but we could lose hours if someone didn’t take the controller from my brother when we were in the overworld. But it’s problems like this that make co-op gaming memorable, all your game experiences are shared and can be brought up in the future to humiliate your closest friends.

I’m hopeful for the future of co-op games, of course this optimism may be overly influenced by the announcement of a cooperative emphasizing Lord of the Rings game followed closely by the release of Splinter Cell: Conviction and Monster Hunter Tri. We co-op gamers must remain hopeful to continue to walk our path, given how often our hopes are dashed. I still remember the first time I read that Prototype was going to be two player cooperative and the first time I read that they were pulling that feature. I remember the terrible camera angles in Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams. I remember gathering star bits in Mario Galaxy as my brother flew through an interstellar wonderland. And I remember the countless iterations of Dynasty Warriors I’ve played just to get a co-op fix. In spite of all these memories, I will persevere and hope that co-op gaming will become a larger part of gaming. If it doesn’t, then I’m back to making sure my brother doesn’t pass out at the Harvest Moon wine festival.