Mon 25 Feb 2008
I just don’t get it. How could a potentially great game like Motorstorm fail on such a basic, primal level. How hard is it to add a splitscreen mode to a video game? How hard is it to realize that splitscreen in a racing game is not just a good idea, it’s friggin necessary!
My wife is a gamer. Not only casual games like Tetris and Suduko, she also played Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, Project Gotham 3 and a whole slew of other games with me. She doesn’t care much for single-player games but she loves to play with me splitscreen. Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter I and II were amazing! We were able to play splitscreen AND online either with 14 other people in campaign and co-op modes, or huge player-only battles! Rainbow Six Vegas pissed us off because the splitscreen wasn’t online, but at least we could play the two of us against 40 or so bots. She wouldn’t even touch Call of Duty 4 because the splitscreen mode is also not online and there are no bots for us to kill together. How fun is it to play splitscreen 1 on 1 in an FPS? Not very.
Stupid things like this piss me off. Horrible decision making. I don’t care if the graphics are crippled in split-screen (as with Rainbow Six Vegas). I just want to be able to play with my wife. Is that too much to ask? Especially for racing games! This should be a mandatory feature!
Oh well, let’s see how long the single-player can keep my attention before this game gets traded or sold. At least MotorStorm 2 is supposed to have 4 player splitscreen. I guess the designers saw how big of a blunder it was not to have it.
March 17th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
You think you have it tough? I struggle to find a decent PC game that has even half a mention of split screen mode. Makes me sad that developers nowadays assume everyone has access to a network (or at least one with other games). And it’s not like they can complain about having only a single mouse - you can plug 2 into a computer and use them as separate devices (plenty of demo code *free* for devs to look at). Kinda wish I had a console sometimes just to have at least some of the games with split screen.
I agree with you about killing the graphics just to get dual play too - gameplay is far more important than graphical quality.