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[–]zecg 4 points5 points


Left 4 Dead (and 2) is great. But even though it is slick, I think Battlefield 1942 had more of an impact. I don't know if I would call it "best", but it influenced me very strongly. I played much BF:BC2, don't really like BF3.

Going back, Quake 3: Arena, UT2004, RTCW multiplayer (and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory), the original Doom I and II, Counter-Strike is still going strong, but those early betas in LAN with a ton of maps were special. Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield was also strong, we had LAN parties and played coop only.

When it comes to contemporary local coop, Rayman: Origins and Renegade Ops, fantastic fun whenever someone takes the second pad.

Going way back, my brother and me used to play 2P Tetris on C64 (it had coop with a big field) and about 1988 Blood Brothers on ZX Spectrum blew my mind with split-screen interspersed with flying segments.

But the one game I'd single out as best multiplayer experience would have to be Descent 2 in our university's computer labs, circa 1997-8? It was 6-degrees of freedom deathmatch, coop campaign, it even had leveling up (ranks) and I carried my savegames with my admiral rank char on floppies. One guy bought the SpaceTec Space Orb, some carried MS Sidewinders to class. That game was way ahead of its time. There was a home baked editor we used, called Devil: . The engine supported portals, you could have had metaspaces which were overlayed, mazes with no limitations. There was a map which you could dominate if you entered the center "volcano" like structure, so a friend made a secret tunnel and a door textured like a wall and changed that map on all computers and we used it to sneak around behind the camper's back. We didn't even manage that many hours of play, since it was a computer lab back in the days when computers were shiny and expensive stuff and it was connected to the Internet back when most people didn't have anything at home (or had a poor modem). But it was such a strong game, and the skill ceiling was so high, we felt each of us was getting better by the minute as we played. We had a metagame, we had a small community, we learned about networking and OpenGL drivers and mouse sampling rates and 3D editing. It was simply great.