Way back in the day, I was a Sega person. Like everyone else at my college, I had a Genesis (Jenny), but I followed Sega into the Saturn (good system, far too expensive, some memorable games), and the Dreamcast (outstanding system, some fantastic games). Then Sega came to an end due to their own pricing, strange marketing, and lack of third-party support… oh, and the relentless PS/PS2 juggernaut. Afterwards, I had to find something else. On a weekend where my wife (girlfriend at the time) anticipated us being snowed in and unable to escape from visiting her parents house, we picked up a PS2. It was Sony who killed Sega, but the whole “love the one who defeats you” vibe is strong here.

That PS2 was good to us, both for that snowed-in weekend and the couple of years since. I’ve previously mentioned the number of cooperative multiplayer games that we enjoyed. The PS2 also had Katamari Damacy, one of the greatest games of all time. Also, any number of fighting games (Virtua Fighter/Soul Calibur), solid jrpgs (Disgaea), platformers (including the awesome and fun Ratchet and Clank series), video board/card games (cheers to Culdcept), and basically any single-player game you could ever want… as long as you could live without Zelda/Mario and Halo. Which we easily could.

(And as an aside, what’s the deal with Halo? The single-player game is completely average, and I’ve already played the Quake series and both the original and revised Counterstrike, which are better than Halo multiplayer. This is the same phenomenon that prevents me from enjoying any modern group-based reality show: I watched the first four seasons of The Real World during their original broadcasts. Everything else is a permutation or reaction to the original, with very little innovation. It just amazes me that in a world where Half-Life and its sequels exist that Halo can be that popular.)

So we got on the PS3 early, and it’s been even better to us than the PS2. Netflix plus Blu-ray plus excellent scaleup of normal dvds would have been enough to make it a good purchase. However, we’ve picked up a few games (Ratchet and Clank, Rock Band, Assassin’s Creed, Ninja Gaiden) that really make the system sing. There’s also the PlayStation store that has demos, downloadable content, and complete small games (Pixeljunk Monsters, Super Puzzle Fighter, Everyday Shooter) that are the perfect cost-to-joy ratio. It makes me smile when I come home from work and my wife is trying to rainbow a level on Pixeljunk Monsters.

And we got on PS3 early, before Sony dropped two things we’ve come to love:

1. Backwards-compatibility! So we still drop in our PS2 Culdcept and relax to old-school good fun. And I’m planning on picking up PS2 God of War 2 now that it’s a greatest hit.
2. Card readers. When I lost the cable connecting our camera to my computer, my early-rev PS3 had a card reader and USB capability that bailed us out. Not ideal, but got us by.

It’s an excellent media machine, with easy connection to my computer for browsing photos and watching avi’s. Going through your photo album on a big HDTV with company over was surprisingly satisfying. It’s my preferred way to show photos now. Also, Blu-ray won. The PS3 is the best blu-ray player in existance, and will continue to be so because of the frequent firmware updates.

People complain about the lack of a huge catalog of games, but honestly I’m a new dad, work a full time job, and have a WoW habit. I’m happy with a few excellent games.

PS3 gets a big thumbs up.

What happens when you’ve got two gamers (me and my wife) who can’t play a game together, but you both want to play? Someone rides shotgun. This can be due to the game being single-player, or more recently, due to the need for someone to hold an infant.

The person who rides shotgun doesn’t have to focus on controls or the repetitive tasks that take up a lot of time on gaming. They focus on the big picture, missed details, and so on. If the game is something you’re both interested in, you combine to become something of a superplayer. For example, I can’t spot those hidden flags in Assassin’s Creed for the life of me, but she’ll pick out one that’s under a pile of hay, which is itself under a tarp… three miles away, through dense fog, around the corner. She spots the tiny corner of that flag, and we get closer to completing the game. In Pixeljunk Monsters, I point out that she tends to stand next to mobs, waiting for them to die, when she could be three steps away, upgrading a tower while she waited. And we get closer to getting a rainbow on that level. (Yes, you can play PJM with two players–and we often do–but when I get home from work and she’s playing, I don’t say, “Drop that and let’s play together.” I fix myself a drink.)

Game Riding Shotgun can be really fun, but the game has to be fun to watch, very well designed or compelling in some other way. So Assassin’s Creed is beautiful and has a good story, but a fighting game gets kind of boring when you’re not playing it, because it’s so repetitive. The original Disgaea had a really funny story and crazy fight animations.

In social games, there’s another angle. We started out in World of Warcraft with her riding shotgun. We designed characters together, chose which to play and where to level, which quests to do, and so on. (This is why most of my toons are women, and this is why I’m stuck with multiple high-level women toons now that she has her own account. I don’t know what everyone else’s excuse is.)

Probably the best benefit of someone riding shotgun in a social game like WoW is that our superplayer worked even better in conversation than it did in gameplay. Someone would speak (type) to us, and either of us could respond. I’m a fast typer, so the person on the other end didn’t know that we were two people unless we told them. So our superplayer ended up being 100% more funny than me alone. Our friends in WoW who learned that we were a “playing couple” became excited when my wife got a computer and an account. The downside for me was that when she got her own account, my perceived wit dropped by 50%. Well, maybe 55%. She’s pretty funny.

Riding shotgun has its benefits, and when there is a quality single-player game it can be a great time for both of you. I’m really looking forward to playing Portal with her game riding shotgun, as well as Disgaea 3 and trying our first Final Fantasy for the PS3, whenever that comes out.

My wife loves games as much as I do, and luckily we love playing games together. We laugh and cheer when we do well, we groan when we can’t get past a certain point. Playing together is the most fun part of video games. It’s a great social thing that we can do.

My favorite cooperative multiplayer experience is probably old-school pen-and-paper roleplaying, which I could speak a nearly infinite amount about. But physically getting adults together on a regular basis is a limit function that approaches infinite pain. And my wife’s not into it.

Board games are a wonder of social, non-sport multiplayer gaming. My wife and I are down with BoardGameGeek, we own maybe a dozen excellent board games. We play them with our game-inclined friends whenever we get the chance, but unfortunately they require getting together in person, which is happening much less frequently now that we’re new parents. There are a great number of two-person board games, and we own and enjoy our share. Lost Cities is always a great time. The problem is that most two-person board games are competitive, which gets old faster than cooperative play for us. So while board games will always be an interest, cooperative video games get a lot more time.

The problem is that cooperative video games aren’t at all common. You can’t search based on it in any game engine that I’m aware of. You can occasionally search to find multiplayer games, but without the coop filter you pretty much get the ocean of shooters as your output. And on Gamespot, even with the coop filter you get an ocean of shooters.

We loved Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance on the PS2. The Gauntlet-style gameplay, done well, never gets old for either of us. We played straight through that game, as well as the crappy sequel and crappy knockoff that followed. Even crappy coop is good coop. Where’s a really good Gauntlet for my PS3? Don’t tell me that the crappy Rocketman is our best shot.

And yes, we tried Dark Kingdoms, as well as Lego Star Wars for the PS3. Actually, those two games failed for the same reason: poor camera behavior + coop + platformy jumping puzzles = utter frustration. The games were obviously designed for a single-player experience, and then coop was added on and mostly untested, because no human would suffer that level of frustration.

It’s not that the PS3 has no coop games. We’re loving Pixeljunk Monsters right now. The game’s so good that we’re going to purchase the expansion on day one of its release, and give a good look at the other games the company develops. Also, Rock Band is pure joy. We’ve got a two person band, and then a four person band for when our best friends come over. And it is so ridiculously fun.

There’s some good coop multiplayer on the PC, but unfortunately it requires the upkeep of two computers. We played through Titan Quest and the expansion. We tried Hellgate London, the horrible experience of which I’ll relate later. MMORPGs are excellent candidates, and World of Warcraft is the one for us. However, the game would never have lasted this long in our lives if we couldn’t play together. I wonder how much of these games is the social element; the ability to play with friends?

Why aren’t there more multiplayer cooperative games? Are me and my wife the only ones who love it? Or is our demographic that small? Are there other good duo or multiplayer games out for the PC or PS3 that I’m unaware of?

So game makers: chop chop! More cooperative games, please. My wife and I have money for you.