You can always find me in the drift
I’ve been thinking a lot about ogres lately. Specifically, Cho’gall, the recently released two-headed character inHeroes of the Storm. As far as I know, he’s totally unique in the MOBA world as the only hero that requires two players to control him at the same time. One player controls the movement and melee while the other one controls the ranged attacks and the ability to dash. It’s a ridiculous mix. From a strictly competitive standpoint, Cho’gall seems stupid. But he’s just the kind of stupid that I love.
I’ve always had a soft spot not just for co-op gaming, but for co-op games that split the work between the players in interesting ways. Weird games that give the players two different kinds of tasks to accomplish but make them dependent on each other at the same time, often to frustrating and hilarious results, but also occasional moments of brilliance. Those rare special times when you can get in sync with someone enough to really act as one and pull off an accomplishment neither of you could do on your own.
It’s an idea I don’t think you see enough of in games. There are tons of co-op and team experiences out there, but too few of them really have you and your partners doing something different. Even so, I’ve been lucky enough to play a few of these games over the years and I’d like to share some of my favorites with you.
Bimini Run
Bimini Runis one of those old 16-bit games where I wondered for years if it was just some kind of fever dream of my imagination or not. Forget showing up on lists of “classic Genesis games” or anything, I could never find another person who played it let alone had an opinion about it. But it was something special for it’s time. A bizarreMiami Vicemeets proto-open world speedboat game with an even more bizarre two-player mode.
Bimini Runcould be played alone, but if you were young and had an annoying little brother who insisted on playing as well (like I totally did), there was an option to let you both play at once by splitting the driving and shooting between two players. Player one would take the wheel (rudder?) while player two would man the machine gun and mortar launcher (like all speedboats have, right?) and together you’d try and weave around a pixilated coastline and light up other boats, helicopters, and huts.
Make no mistake, this was theworstway to play. But it was also thebest. For a game that we only rented once and has wallowed in relative obscurity ever since (although some fans did come out of the woodwork when Giant Bomb did aquicklookof it recently), I have fantastic memories ofBimini Run. It was a trial by fire for my brother and I of just how dedicated we were to beating the game in a single weekend balanced against the urge to kill each other out of frustration. I’m pretty sure it started the long-standing tradition we have to this day in co-op games where he’s the designated driver while I man the guns. Quite a legacy for a forgotten game.
Lucky & Wild
Speaking of driving and shooting, did you know there was an arcade rip off of the ‘80s cinema classicTango and Cash? It’s true.Lucky & Wild, released by Namco in 1992 was a sit-down arcade cabinet that played like a hybrid shooter/racing game. The player in the driver’s seat would drive with one hand, shoot with the other, and try and keep track of everything else going on at once. Player two would shoot and feel jealous/relieved that they only had one thing to do.
I suppose driving and shooting is one of the more common types of co-op play out there, butLucky & Wildadded up to more than the sum of its parts. It was an anomaly, offering something completely different from the legion of other lightgun games sandwiched into the dark and dingy recesses of your local arcade. If you were smart, you’d divide up the work; Let player one focus on driving and keeping his gun trained on large, easy-to-hit targets. Player two was on crackshot duty, responsible for shooting down incoming rockets or bombs and making your quarters stretch as long as possible. It was also funny for its day.Lucky & Wildplayed the braindead buddy cop setup for all its worth, an affectionate parody of the most popular kind of movies from the ‘80s.
Lucky & Wildreally was wild, and we were lucky to play it. It’s the kind of arcade game that emulation just can’t do justice to. You had to be there, sitting in that cabinet, mercilessly elbowing the hell out of the ribs of whoever just steered you right into another rocket or wall. It’s a co-op experience that would be difficult if not impossible to relive nowadays.
I’ll be honest though,Lucky & Wildis a favorite of mine for personal reasons as much as it was a legitimately cool game. One of my favorite dumb memories is convincing my mom and grandma to sit down in behind the wheel and guns to give it try in a food court. After a few minutes they did surprisingly well! What can I say, my grandma loved dumb ‘80s action movies.
Battlefield
There are plenty of cooperative shooters out there, but let’s be honest, most of them just have two players doing the same thing at the same time. InGears, Marcus and Dom are both diving into cover, shooting grubs, and chainsawing the occasional unlucky goober. Maybe you’ll divvy up the equipment — Dom will grip the sniper rifle while Marcus keeps things clean with the shotgun — but that’s about as diverse as it gets. If I included shooters, this article would be a lot longer and a lot less interesting.
There is one big exception I’m willing to make to the rule though, because when it comes to usual co-op strategies I have to give it up for theBattlefieldseries. Not only does the series promote some of the coolest class synergies and co-op strategies in any game, but it tests you and your partners to make them work in a chaotic shit-show of a massive firefight that is constantly changing.
Sure, there are a lot of shooters with the “I’ll drive and you shoot” divide, but none of them do it quite likeBattlefield. It’s more like “I’ll pilot this specific type of helicopter and man the dumbfire rockets and flares while you take this specific gunner position and simultaneously repair the bird, man the gun, and occasionally fire a guided missile” or “I’ll drive the APC, you all get out behind the objective, toss out recon probes, and storm the place from an oblique angle while I draw fire.” If you want to make the most out of the vehicles in theBattlefieldseries, you’ll need at least one teammate you’re in total sync with and ideally a few more for proper Thunder Cloud Formation action.
Of course I have to give extra props toBad Company 2andBF3in particular. My brother and I played an unhealthy amount of both of them and had a few techniques down to a science.BC2’s amazing destruction system (pound for pound still the best in the business in my opinion) let us breach and clear like pros — if by “breach and clear” you mean my bro opening up a hole in the wall with a grenade launcher and me running in and quickly tossing around enough C4 to bring down the whole building. Or when we’d go fly swatting inBF3with the Recon unit’s laser designator and the Javelin missile system, keeping the skies nice and clear. With some good teamwork, just two players working together in the right way at the right time could make a huge difference in a game defined by its massive player count. Brothers gonna work it out, indeed.
Portal 2
Goddamn do I love the idiot robots ofPortal 2’s co-op mode. Yeah, GLaDOS get’s all the love (and she should, she’s excellent), but I gotta give it up for P-Body and Atlas, the robotic testing duo of dubious intelligence.
You know that trust game where one person leans back until they fall and trusts that their partner will catch them? It’s supposed to reinforce bonds and break down suspicion. Well,Portal 2’s co-op is kind of like that, only instead of leaning back till you tip over, you’re suspended over a massive chasm filled with acid or molten slag, and instead of catching you, nine times out of ten your dickbag partner decides it would behilariousto make you take a swim. It reinforces resentment, and encourages squabbles and problem drinking.
Portal 2’s co-op mode wasn’t long, but it was memorable. It let you play with puzzles that would be impossible in single-player, forcing you and your partner to think laterally and develop all kinds of new strategies and ideas. Especially when you get far enough into the game to play with the frictionless gel and bouncy paint.
What I love most aboutPortal 2’s co-op though was how the addition of an extra player opened up ways to break the game. If onePortalplayer can come up with weird speedrun routes and unintended solutions to puzzles, two players working together could bust the testing facility wide open. Me and the person I went through the co-op campaign with were so committed to being clever little assholes that I’m still not sure if we ever solved all of the puzzles “properly.”
The only thing more fun than playing with your toys is breaking them in some entertaining way. Just like strapping fireworks to G.I Joes behind the school.
Left 4 Dead
Yeah, yeah, I know I just said no more shooters, and yes, as the default survivors inL4D, you’re pretty much all doing the same thing — shooting zombies and smacking things with your medpack. But that’s for the boring old humans with their stupid guns and lame one-liners. What I’m talking about is when you play for the other team, when you take control of the zombies.
I don’t thinkL4Dever got the credit it deserved for its multiplayer, but on the same blush, I can understand why. Playing as the zombies in multiplayer was a tense game of peek-a-boo, chicanery, guts, and teamwork. It took three other teammates with a solid understanding of the game, excellent communication, and the wits to make the best of things when the RNG just refused to spawn a freaking Smoker for your team when you really needed one. These qualities were what made it feel so damn good when it all clicked, and what made it fall apart into one-sided stompfests for the humans when it didn’t.
Each type of special infected the players could take control of had their own role to play in the zombie apocalypse, and it took careful coordination and skill to make them work. Because you never got to choose your infected type, you had no choice but to get good at all of them if you wanted to take the multiplayer seriously. I spent a long time trying to perfect 25-point Hunter jumps and Smoker skillshots in the winter of 2008. I watched a lot of YouTube videos about just how far Boomer spray could spread or how much it would arc at a distance before becoming ineffective. Learning how to not crack under the pressure of suddenly becoming the frighteningly (somewhat less than his reputation would have you believe) powerful Tank and not just eat a molotov as soon as it spawned.
I think it’s a strange and wonderful thing that playing as the drooling zombies became the “thinking man’s” part ofL4D.
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
Bomb disposal might just be the ultimate co-op game. Who would have guessed that the threat of sudden explosive death could bring friends and family together likeKeep Talking and Nobody Explodesdoes? Turns out that confusing instructions, bad second-hand descriptions of what a device looks like, and the ruthless pressure of a ticking countdown is the perfect recipe for a fun evening with your crew.
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodesis another one of those games that you have to play to really get. The Oculus version is probably the best (I wouldn’t know), but the PC version works just as well so long as nobody cheats and peeks at the screen. For anyone unaware, it’s a game where one person tries to disarm an explosive device by relaying a description of what it looks like and what it’s doing to his or her team of “experts” who can look things up in a confusing, often poorly organized, printed-out bomb disarming manual. Bonus points if you find a battered old binder to keep the manual in and mess it up with some coffee stains and dog ears for that “authentic” experience.
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodesis a group co-op game. While it’s fine with two players, it’sfantasticwith three or four. Not because it will make you more effective bomb disposal experts, more the opposite (at least at first). Getting more hands on the manual means more chaos and squabbling, more people talking over each other and pulling the book away from one another. More sudden BOOMS. Eventually, everyone will pick up on their own tricks or areas of expertise and you can start delegating certain roles to different players. Suddenly you’ll actually start surviving and taking on more and more complex bombs. It’s like watching theKeystone Copstransform into theHurt Lockercrew over the course of an evening. Well, until the drinks start taking their toll. Then it might be time to segue over toGang BeastsorJackbox, something a little less cerebral.
I’m still waiting for the dream weird co-op game. A kind ofQctodadmeetsKeep Talking and Nobody Explodeswhere you and four friends control the different limbs and head of a mech,Voltronstyle. The day someone comes up with that is the day I’ll press-gang all of my friends into the robotic defense force. Until then I guess I’ll have to be satisfied with forcing someone into playing Cho’gall with me.
I’m always on the lookout for other weird co-op games. If you have some you love that I missed, please share them with in the comments below!
