After the multiplayer rant, time for some multiplayer love.

After last week's rant about not wanting to pay for tacked on multiplayer I got thinking. Online multiplayer just isn’t as personal as it was before the advent of the internet. It brought on a reflection on my gaming past.

Multiplayer for a few means one thing now. Howling obscenities through the headset while playing this week’s Call of Battlefield. Something about the relative anonymity of gamertags just seems to bring out the worst of people online. Angry teens spray out the kind of stuff that would land you in hospital if it were overheard in a pub.

Remember when a multiplayer session was you and three mates huddled round your fourteen inch tv playing Micro Machines Turbo Tournament ’96 on the Megadrive? That is of course unless you had a friend with really accommodating parents who let you hook up to the twenty-eight in the living room. I had a session like that the other day. We sat around my mates fifty-two inch LCD, playing an eighteen year old Megadrive whose graphics looked a whole lot less like ass than we had any right to expect and had time comparable in greatness to any I have experienced in the twenty years I have owned a console. Seriously, it was mental. And while bullshit was called on many occasions, once by myself after one of my own unjustified wins, not once did the banter degenerate into the kind of racist, sexist, homophobic, jingoistic filth that gets streamed through my headset from the mouth of the last person who beat me down in Halo. Something about having the person you’ve just beaten sat next to you puts paid to that kind of thing, you know?

But really, this isn’t a rant about the state of online gaming. This is a love letter to what the young ‘uns call ‘local multiplayer’.  It wasn’t just eight hours of Micro Machines and its infamous Sponge track though. In that same session we played Powerstone 2, Sonic Adventure 2 match races, the insane Chu Chu Rocket and Virtua Tennis 2 on the Dreamcast. After all that, the PS1 was busted out for a round of Crash Bash. The only thing that stopped the whole thing slipping into endless races on Circuit Breakers and Crash Team Racing was time.

It really slammed home how much fun games that are ten, twelve and in some cases up to sixteen years old are in comparison to what is about today. Part of it I suppose is all the old rivalries that we were carrying between ourselves on those games. There was the same old rush for Tommy Haas and Tim Henman on Virtua Tennis and the same endless wars on the sponge in Micro Machines.

Helpfully, since the openly hostile attitude of online multiplayer was nowhere to be seen I was also able to manage the realisation of something of an age old gaming dream: To bring my significant other into the fold, and miraculously, she had as good a time as the rest of us. It helped to show up how the most accessible games are the most fun. You are instantly good at Virtua Tennis as soon as you return a shot. Chu Chu Rocket’s barely contained insanity bought the laughs and howls of despair at having a cat dropped in your rocket seconds before the lead was translated into victory. Sonic Adventure 2 is admittedly less than accessible, but since we only played that to settle a simmering old rivalry from the last time we had the Dreamcast out, it’s a moot point.

The high point of the session was undoubtedly Crash Bash. Its collection of quickly understood yet downright silly mini games just clicked with my girlfriend for some reason. She beat three seasoned vets of Crash Bash hands down in Polar Push, Pogo Pandemonium, Crate Crush and Ballistix. We all had a laugh and she left feeling great, having her first multiplayer victories under her belt. I doubt I’ve ever seen that online.

It left me thinking that the only one of the big three that gives local multiplayer a look in now is Nintendo. Think about it, the 360 can connect to up to four controllers, the PS3 can take seven or eight, but can you remember the last time that actually happened? If you own one of the more ‘hardcore’ consoles, multiplayer all but confirms the stereotype of the lone gamer sat in the dark in his bedroom. And that seems like a step backwards.

In positioning the Wii as a family friendly machine, Nintendo found a ton of local multiplayer games forthcoming. But for every light hearted game like Mario Kart, Mario Party or Smash Bros, it seemed like there were a dozen lightweight mini game collections that got it all wrong. There’s a difference between the two. The lightweight stuff doesn’t need much in the way of thinking and the gameplay boils mostly down to the Wii Waggle. There’s no satisfaction in victory from that. The best multiplayer games are light hearted and accessible to the n00b, yet still need you to think. The thrill of a good multiplayer game comes from the feeling of outsmarting your opponents, not waving your arms in the air. Supersonic games understood this when they made Micro Machines Turbo Tournament ’96. That’s why they included the sponge track. You can joust on it.

There was another feature of Micro Machines that made it a great multiplayer game. Pad sharing. Eight people sharing four pads and eight cars on track at once, with all the mayhem that came with it. It’s a feature that seems to have disappeared altogether, now that multiplayer seems to have lost its sense of fun and gotten serious.

And fun is really what multiplayer should be all about. It really is worth tracking down some of the multiplayer Greats for a session at a mate’s house. Those who have played Bishi Bashi, Crash Bash, Crash Team Racing, Circuit Breakers, Micro Machines, Smash Bros, Goldeneye, Mario Kart (even though it’s an irrational personal pet hate of mine, don’t ask why because I couldn’t possibly tell you), Mario Party (better without the boardgame element), Micro Machines, Tekken, Street Fighter, Timesplitters, Dancing Stage and Rock Band will tell you that competing together, in the same room, is the best part of gaming as a whole.  

I’ve probably missed one or two there, but with a few mates and a few drinks they make an amazing night in. I have a feeling there is a yawning gap in the market for games like these that isn’t being filled. Ok, we get the odd release like the recent Sonic and Sega All-Stars, but a lot of the time, multiplayer in a new release boils down to a tacked-on online mode. I might be right, or I might be horribly wrong on that statement, but split screen games bring people together in the best possible way. Online is at its best when you’re in a closed party with people you know. And in that case, why not get everyone together in one room?

There might be beers.