Nick Adams Games Blog

I recently went along to an Xbox 360 LAN party with some of my friends. We brought along a few Xbox 360 consoles, controllers and games and even some headsets. The plan was to hook a few Xbox consoles up to a few tv’s around the house and to play some system link multiplayer games.

Setting up the equipment was pretty straightforward; it was setting up the games which actually proved a difficult task.

Army of Two

The first game we decided to play in multiplayer was Army of Two. After going through the menu’s on the game and reading the instruction manual, we discovered that this game has no system link option! In order to play each other, we had to connect to the internet, host a private online match over Xbox live and have the other team – only a few precious metres away – join the private match. It was also irritating that, because it was over the internet, we had to piggyback off someone else’s gamertag. Considering Army of Two is such a co-op themed game, you’d have thought that the developers would make it as easy as possible to do have system link setups!

Gears of War

Gears of War was refreshingly fun to play for a title which is approaching 2 years old. The graphics still look incredible, and the tactical cover dynamic still hasn’t really been bettered by any of the more recent Xbox 360 games. As a party game, like Army of Two, there’s only a maximum of 2 people per console so after a few games on rotation we decided to get everyone involved in another game famous for its multiplayer…

Halo 3

I’d never realised how flexible Halo 3 truly was until this event. At this time of night our group had petered out to just 5 people, and we had 2 people on one Xbox and 3 people on the other console. After Gears and Army of Two this was something short of a revelation to have so many people playing at one given time. I’d also never realised how much fun could be had by watching the saved replays of our matches as we provided running commentary while viewing our performances of team deathmatch on high ground.

Call of Duty 4

And then there was the grand finale, Call of Duty 4. This is currently the favourite Xbox live multiplayer game of choice, and we were really anticipating some system link action. COD4 split screen is fun enough by itself, but the whole idea of having teams in different rooms battle it out like we’d just did with Halo nearly made us salivate. But to our horror, we discovered that COD4 has possibly the most gimped system link ever seen – it will only let 1 person play per console. The frustrating thing is that we know a single Xbox 360 can handle 4 people split screen. This was a huge disappointment, and slightly reluctantly we went back to some 3 v 2 Halo 3 matches.

The Final Word…

System link games when they’re done right can really make for some of the most fun console experiences. I find the best type of system link experiences are ones that combine traditional split screen multiplayer and the modern multiplayer climate of squad based FPS’s: your room vs another room. Its the way you can talk to someone else without using a ridiculous headset; the way you can even see someone else’s screen on your team to help co-ordinate your attacks and strategies and knowing somewhere in your network, there’s a bunch of people doing exactly the same thing. For me, thats the type of social gaming best suited to the Xbox and its available games. As it stands right now, it would seem that video games developers couldn’t care less for this setup.