Tag: call of duty multiplayer

Why Your Multiplayer Needs Soul

There are those certain types of games out there, the ones that have you discussing for days or weeks on end how you totally stomped your opponents, or some random happenstance that blew your mind. These are the games that get you back together with your friends on a nightly basis to trade blows and throw grenades, striving to be the best, to get the next unlock, or just compete for bragging rights.

Just by imagining these scenarios, you probably conjured up a list of your favorite experiences and the games they were connected to. Whether its the exact right combination of tight mechanics and engaging gameplay, or just the fact that you can destroy your environments in real time with your friends, there are multiplayer experiences out there that stick with us through different consoles and generations. Conversely, there are certain ones that, no matter how much they try to emulate the successful models, just can’t achieve that level of notoriety. This is a sort of nebulous aspect about multiplayer games, a “soul” for lack of a better term. Which games have it, and which games don’t?
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Poll: Which Type of Shooter Do You Prefer?

Last night, I fired up Halo: Reach for the first time in several weeks. I think it was something of a coping mechanism, since I know I’m going to be holding out on Call of Duty: Black Ops until around Christmas. It was pretty nuts to see everyone on my friends list in the new CoD, and meanwhile I was playing the classic space marine scenario.

The funny thing is, I had a lot more fun than I expected to, even though I’m itching for Black Ops more than I can say. One of the things I’ve always loved about Halo is the ability to have these isolated little firefights, epic stand-offs between you and one other player that feels separated from the rest of the match. The only reason this is possible is because of the way the game’s health system works. I remember Goldeneye playing much the same way back in the old days.

It seems that as time goes on, more shooters go in a different direction. Like Counter-Strike, the health in CoD pretty much works on the “one shot, one kill” method, which is a big part of what makes it so addictive I think. The ability to respawn and immediately jump back into the fray and rack up more kills has a lot of appeal to it, for a totally different reason than a shooter like Gears of War or Halo.

Thinking about these two styles of play, I thought I’d make a poll to see what you guys think. Got a preference?

Which type of multiplayer shooter do you prefer?

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