Aegis Wing which is a FREE XBLA game, has 4 player on one box. Game difficulty adjusts accordingly. It’s a side-scrolling shooter in the vein of Gradius.
The only Monster Madness review I saw was Sharkey’s at 1up, and it said single player was basically horrible, multiplayer was basically great.
And Marvel Ultimate Alliance definitely supports 4 players locally, that list sounds incomplete/wrong.
There’s a lot of confusion. The Halo 3 beta, for example, likely only supported 2 players because it didn’t support local play at all. Halo 2 supported same-machine split screen 4 player games, Xbox Live 16 player games, and system link games with 4 player split screen, but only 2 players per machine on Xbox Live. See? Confusing. Likely, Halo 3 will be a similar setup, though I haven’t heard confirmation of that.
I really hope Halo 3 supports 4 players per screen, even if the beta didn’t. Me and my friends have played a lot of Halo and Halo 2 where we had to split the screen three ways or four ways. Sometimes you just don’t have enough TVs/Xboxes to go around, you know? For Halo, we tried to always have 4 TVs and 4 Xboxes, and 4 copies of Halo, but that meant that if we got more than 8 people to show up on Halo Friday, someone would have to split their screen 3 ways or 4 ways. This was generally acceptable on the huge 67 inch HDTV.
Plus even with Halo 2, even though we all split up and went home and played on our own Boxes, sometimes we’d still get guests over who wanted to play, and we’d again be able to split the screen up to 4 ways. It just happens, you don’t plan for it. You don’t say “OK, today I’m going to need a 4 way split screen” but if its an option, it gives you one more thing you can do.
I was pretty mad at Project Gotham Racing for moving backward in this regard. PGR2 didn’t support split screen gaming when you went online. You could either do split screen, or go online by yourself. PGR3 also didn’t allow 4 way split screen anymore, which was very disappointing. Especially back near the launch of the 360. The PGR series is one of our favorite franchises, but it sucked not being able to race against each other.
It’s the same with the FIFA games, which is annoying. Why on earth can’t two people playing on the same box go online and play against someone else? Why does online play in a soccer game have to be one on one?
Don’t forget R6 Vegas which has great 4 player co-op support.
Actually, you’re right about all those except for Halo 2 only allowing 2 players per machine on Xbox Live. It allowed 4 players per machine on Xbox Live. I know because I’ve played it many times that way.
What’s this selling for? Its already sold at $40, “maybe” at $50 and “I’ll wait till I can bargin bin it” at $60.
Again, that’s not per machine. R6 Vegas does indeed have excellent 4 player coop support for both Coop Story and for Coop Terrorist Hunt. But it doesn’t have support for more than one person over Xbox Live per machine. If you want to play split screen, your options are 2 player Coop Story or 2 player Coop Terrorist Hunt. If you want to play over System Link, you can (unfortunately) only play one person per 360. Which is a shame, because it means to get a 8 player game, you need 8 360s.
Ooops, you’re right.
Just to clear it all up, yes I mean 4 player on the same box locally. So before you guys say “But X supports 4 players!” please consider what I originally meant, and that I don’t really care how many players are supported over system link/xbox live (for any game with online multiplayer I would expect that # to be far above 4 anyways!)
As for Marvel Ultimate Alliance, does it support 4 players on the same box? And Monster Madness, are those guys releasing a demo or not? Sounds like it might be fun.
It doesn’t get any easier than splitting a screen into 4. Shrink everything by a factor of 4 and cram 4 viewpoints. Voila. When games like Gears of War only support 2-player split screen I think its dev laziness to not optimize their game and turn off some eyecandy in favor of 4-player fun.
Yes, MUA is 4 players on the same Xbox.
And Monster Madness, are those guys releasing a demo or not? Sounds like it might be fun.
They already released a demo, but it was a while ago, and it wasn’t well received here at Qt3. One of the developers is a regular poster here, I believe, and he did say that the demo was a really early build of the game and they’ve made a lot of improvements since then.
Neat, since I was basically responsible for coding nearly all of the multiplayer modes :P. Actually, it’s ironic because I never even played much of the single player until we had almost finished the game, and as I progressed through, I was amazed at the drastic contrasts between the earlier levels and later ones. We hired a guy to write for us about halfway done, and you absolutely know the instant his writing kicks in because the game just gets so much better. Aside from the Park level (shooting rockets out of a swan boat at pirate zombies is really fun) the early levels are barely reflective of what comes later in the game. I laughed out loud a few times in the Demon Lord fight.
Either way, I feel the single player is definitely a game for multiple players. Once I brought 3 friends in, it was an entirely different experience. Not only do you get the full dialog exchanges between all the characters this way, but like most coop games you start automatically strategizing with your fellow players without even knowing it. The dynamic becomes completely different than the standard whack-a-zombie. I would never play MM without at least a second player.
My main problem with the demo was the controls:
1 stick to move, one stick to aim, and still have to pull the trigger to fire… ugh… clunky
meme one:
The advent of online connectivity has freed you from being limited to playing games when your friends can come over. You can now play games with your friends even if they move across the world.
meme two:
Online connectivity has freed you from playing games with the losers you used to call friends. You can now play with like minded people you never would have been able to meet if your gaming was restricted to people you could get into your living room.
Can’t say I’m responsible for the control scheme, it was designed that way from the beginning, FPS-style. The only thing we did since the demo was make it more accurate and add some slight auto-aiming. If it was up to me, I would have just made it so one stick fires and aims instead of having to hit the trigger.
But it’s pissing in the wind, I don’t work for the company anymore and none of my input matters at this point anyway. I wasn’t involved in the design process, at least not SP, so I can’t really offer much more than my apologies for what I agree was not an ideal control scheme. It works for behindview, but overhead… well, it’s already been said.
Your Robotron skills must be rusty. :)
I hated the overhead controls at first, but I’m pretty accustomed to them now. FWIW, if you’re playing single player, the Y button toggles between the overhead fixed view and an over-the-shoulder view. There are a few points in the game where you’re forced into the overhead fixed view, but otherwise, the over-the-shoulder view plays much more like a traditional third-person shooter.
-Tom
The problem, Scry, with making the aiming stick also fire, which would have been exactly like Robotron, is that there are so many different kinds of weapons, as well as reasons to face a given direction without necessarily shooting (getting into a vehicle, for instance, or using a soda machine).
-Tom
Yeah, I see where you’re coming from with certain weapons like the taser and rocket launcher, but I still think there had to have been a better way. How about having one stick both move and aim, and the trigger fire?
I just checked through my games, Ghost Recon is 4 players split screen as well (I don’t have GRAW2).
Yeah, GRAW2 supports 4 local players too.