Since the start of 2007, the gaming systems and devices I’ve played on had been the Wii, PS2, DS Lites, and laptops that my fiancee and I have shared. For the most part, this seemed fine for us. Late last year, My finacee let me go on a desktop shopping spree and finally put together a gaming quality PC by myself for the first time. Before then, I’d always used laptops since I never had much space for a full desktop, but that changed when my Dell laptop started failing. While I’ve had some issues with the desktop I’ve put together, I’ve been glad to have it. Besides doing all the things PCs can do, I’ve also been able to play a lot of the newer games that have also come out on consoles. Sort of.
Porting console games to PCs can be a very hit or miss proposition. Usually you also have to get a controller to get the same level of control, and even then a lack of standard controller on PC leaves you with a lot of tweaking and configuring. There’s also the fact that you have to keep up with hardware, because a lot of games just aren’t designed well for the PC’s hardware specs. Games that don’t even look that well end up taking enourmous amounts of system resources. Apparently, 6 gigs of RAM isn’t everything. Of course, my 1 gig ATI Radeon 4650 left a lot to be desired too.
Now, my fiancee and I like playing games together, even if they’re one player she loves to assist me. She’s good helping me work out the game logic and can be a very good game FAQs researcher for when the time calls for it. All in all, she’s great to play games with. Problem is, while the Wii has multiplayer games, she doesn’t care for competitive gameplay so much. Also, with the PC, it’s out of the way so it’s hard for her to watch me play, so it’s also not that great as it stands. She was done her summer law classes and had nothing to do most of the day while I was at work, so I hooked up the Desktop to our TV. She had a lot of fun with Ghost Master, a PC game I almost forgot I had. We worked that out together, and then she went onto Evil Genius. This is when things started to hit me, about what was wrong. If I wanted her to have fun playing games again, we needed to find games where we could play together like this. Now, the PC isn’t best suited for this, because it’s hard playing games with the trackball and keyboard on the coffee table. So, I convinced her to do something I never even thought I’d be asking myself.
We got an Xbox 360.
Now, I hated the original Xbox. I never liked Halo, and most of the exclusives seemed derivative or boring to me. However, I’ve taken note at the sheer number of co-op games available for it, and it seemed like a very good choice. Sure, the PS3 was also available, but she refuses to buy another Sony product, after having touble with 2 PS2s so far. In fact, my own brother went through 4 PS2’s, and I doubt his is still working today. Also, the Xbox 360 exclusives seemed more interesting to me, and the cross platform games seem to run better on the Xbox 360 too. And as another shocking turn of events, I was checking out the demo for Army of Two, and my fiancee decided to pick up the second controller to play it with me too.
To understand this fully why it is shocking, she hates nearly all shooters. For some reason, she liked the concept of ‘Aggro’ that Army of Two introduces (or steals for MMOs, but whatever), and she started playing it too. She wasn’t fast at lining up shots, but she has her own playing style that is very conservative and she is very good at keeping herself safe. Turns out, this made her a good partner for me, as I tend to a good crackshot, but have a big problem putting myself into harms way. We stopped with Army of Two and moved to the Gears of War series and I’m glad to have her playing with me. Not only is she great to have my character’s back, but she also loves to make fun of the situations present in the game. It’s like my own personal MST3K show for video games.
