Saturday!
http://youtu.be/5mIQrMgTvzQ
The have been a number of games that Maribou and I have deliberately sat down and played together, as a together kind of couple.
The first of which was probably Heroes of Might and Magic II. We held hands for this one.
Moving past that, I’d say that there were about a dozen games… scrabble/tetric for the SNES, Arkanoid, Chronotrigger (the original for the original SNES) that worked for not only “hey, do you want to play this too?” but the whole “let’s hand the controller back and forth” thing.
Now, of course, the more intricate games weren’t good at “I’ve gotta pee! Here take over!” but they were pretty good at two people sitting next to each other and one of them saying “hey, go there, go there, attack that guy… wait! Attack *THAT* guy!” which may have even turned into a discussion of “dude, play it yourself”.
Which allows us to leap to Diablo II.
Diablo II, you may recall, was FREAKING AWESOME. It had the action RPG thing, the gorgeous setting thing, the ability to find a character best suited to your own particular playstyle thing… it had it all, pretty much.
Sadly, Diablo III was not Diablo II.
So you find stuff like Titan Quest or the various Fate games or the Dungeon Sieges… but all of them lack that special something that Blizzard somehow managed to sprinkle into the game.
I think that The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing might have captured a small percentage of that something, though…
It establishes a perfect setting in monster-peppered Eastern Europe and then gives you a nice variety of playstyles from the in your face guy with a sword to the somewhat more distant guy with a handgun to the guy who just prefers little robots to do his interactions for him. After doing all that, it drops traditional monsters from the whole monster-peppered Eastern Europe movie era on top of your monster hunter.
Diablo II veterans should know that they’ve figured out a way to rip off the barbarian, amazon, necromancer (and others!) but package them in a just barely pre-modern monster-hunter template. People who have never played Diablo II should know that they’ve hammered out (ripped off) a number of really, really awesome ways to kill monsters.
Which, if you’ve missed Diablo II and have noticed that Diablo III ain’t Diablo II, is quite welcome.
So… what are you playing?
(Picture is “Untitled” by our very own Will Truman. Used with permission.)
Fold up a dollar bill into a triangle, sit across from each other at a table, and get into some football.
Alternatively, quarters.Report
So many blurry memories.Report
Very timely, since D2 just got patched into this decade earlier this week:
Diablo II v1.14a Patch Notes
Specific Changes & Improvements
– No need to run in XP mode anymore, Windows 7, 8.1, and 10 compatibility complete
– Mac installer and compatibility for 10.10 and 10.11 has arrived
– First client run will migrate saved characters to avoid issues from Windows system
admin changes
Known Issues
– Mac 10.9 and earlier are not supportedReport
We also played a lot of arcade games together back in the day.
Particularly fond memories of Jurassic Park, Resident Evil, and Gauntlet…Report
Having finished my second play-through of Fallout 4, I’ve decided to switch to Civ V for a while. After that I might do a full-DLC play-through of Dragon Age: Inquisition since all the DLC is out now. That will probably keep me occupied until Stellaris comes out in May.Report
HOMM2 was/is special, especially since you could play it hot seat. I’ve always had a deep love of the HOMM series though I am inclined to agree that HOMM 3 probably was the apex of the series.Report
I never really got into HOMM, but I do fondly recall owning a copy of Civnet in the 90s and playing it via modem with a friend.
I guess the modern versions still have MP (I’ve never looked, most of my gaming with friends is done on consoles these days and I loathe random matchmaking — I barely tolerate it for FPS free-for-alls, and even then I prefer co-op campaign or firefight stuff where it’s cooperative versus enemies.).
I think the last truly competitive, head-to-head game I played on PC was Blood Bowl I suppose. Or maybe Xcom.
Even back when I did a lot of RTS with friends, we often played versus the AI — we’d turn the difficulty up and cooperate. Have found memories of Starcraft, Diablo, and Age of Empires. It was just more fun. (Especially since I favored a turtled defense while building up late game units to rampage, and my closest friend preferred deep and fast raids — which he’d lure the enemy back to range of my defenses).Report