I’ve never been much for Valentine’s Day. Most often, it’s nothing more than another day for us. This year, however, we had a fabulous V-Day thanks to some friends who organized a retro-gaming night. They pulled out every gaming system the could get their hands on, and much fun with ancient coleco-visions, segas, nintendos, and other systems I’d never even heard of was had. Most of the games were terrible, particularly when we tried to play with 2-players (or more). It was painfully clear that many older games had very haphazard systems for implementing 2-player action, as if it had been merely tacked-on to give the game more marketability (hmm, I think things have changed very little…). On the other hand, even games that were purposefully designed for 2 or more players (*cough*gauntlet*cough*) were terrible in their execution. Funny how they could pull it off in the arcade, but the experience just isn’t the same at home. To give ourselves some respite from the awful nostalgia, we took on the hordes of undead with some 4-player Left 4 Dead (after stuffing ourselves with pizza, of course). Now *that’s* some pretty cool multi-player action. I was amazed at how little I was bothered by the split-screen and, although I suck at console FPS gaming, how much fun it was. Now there’s a Valentine’s tradition I could get used to.
Tags: friends, holidays, Left 4 Dead, video games