I loved lightgun games on the old systems, and I think the Sega Saturn’s Stunner was the best hardware of the lot. The obsolescence of CRTs pretty much killed the tech, but the gameplay style has made a bit of a resurgence a couple times with the advent of the Wii and VR.
Local multiplayer.
That is, I want my “peripheral” to be the capacity for the game to support a second controller and another human in the same room, not just over the rent-seeking network service.
I used to have to mess with these things:
Now it’s easy, you can just have 4 controllers wirelessly connected to the console, no problem, but most new games don’t have a splitscreen mode. Personally I’ve gotten to the point where I often won’t buy a game if it only has online multiplayer.
Also, I want LAN parties back.
Online services have taken so much away from us.
And those that do, they are all competitive vs games. Everything has to be a survival of the fittest battle
Why I loved borderlands so much. Co-op was just better. My brother and I spent countless hours on those types of games
Be the change you want to see. My office has a LAN party once a year. There’s also consoles and board games for the non-gamers. The boss orders spare ribs for dinner and we do sone kind of fun pub quiz thing. It’s a lot of fun.
i just realized that ‘spare rib’ could refer to women.
Oh I’m absolutely into board games. I’m playing through Jaws of the Lion with a friend right now.
There’s a fair bit of nostalgia in this lament. I don’t just want to have a LAN party… I want LAN party culture back. The ubiquity of the online services has killed it.
On the flip side, I’m older and have kids now. I love that I can game online a few times a week with friends, because I don’t have time for old school weekend-long LAN parties.
Is it LAN parties you miss? Or being young and having more free time than responsibilities and common sense?
Eh, column A… column B…
It’s not just pining for my misspent youth, it’s the sense of community… the shared common experience of playing games together and shouting insults at each other across the room, getting together and comparing PC builds, helping each other with troubleshooting, plugging two 360s into each other for a 4v4 on Snowbound…
In some ways the activity doesn’t matter that much, it’s the spending time with other people… but that time and place where a really good game matched with a good group of players was where the most fun happened.
No game can ever be really great without a community, and there are aspects of community-building that don’t translate into online spaces, especially not ones that charge rent.