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The Girlfriending Part Two : PC Games
Teyar
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Well, the last thread went allright... we played some 360 games, and it generally was allright.
And then she went and got a laptop. So! One wonders. Whats good in the two-player friendly PC games?
What can be used to start epic rivalries, or unmatched levels of co-operation? You, the population of this fine blue board, I challenge!
.... help me find something good for me and my GF to play. I swear I've done singleplayer games so long I've almost trained my brain to ignore multiplay. >.>
And then she went and got a laptop. So! One wonders. Whats good in the two-player friendly PC games?
What can be used to start epic rivalries, or unmatched levels of co-operation? You, the population of this fine blue board, I challenge!
.... help me find something good for me and my GF to play. I swear I've done singleplayer games so long I've almost trained my brain to ignore multiplay. >.>
Kick At The Darkness Until It Bleeds Daylight
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Diablo II!
There. :-)
Try to convince your g/f to make a healer, while you role a tank, you can always find a group for instances that way :P
Personally, I just bought the WoW Battlechest on a whim and canceled before the first month was done. I really, really regret wasting the money. At least you can sell most other games you don't like.
Starting point:
http://www.co-optimus.com/system/4/pc.html
What types of games is she interested in?
- Left 4 Dead if she can handle FPS's OK. Communication is a MUST on the higher difficulties.
- Serious Sam 1 & 2 if you're looking for purely mindless co-op shooting carnage
- Red Alert 3 if she likes RTS's (very camp and very fun).
- Dawn of War 2 for smaller and more structures squad level co-op strategy (much more serious minded though)
- Dungeon Siege 1 and 2 for co-op Action RPG fun. DS 2 in particular. Diablo 3's already been mentioned, this is a good modern (ish) equivalent.
- The Typing of the Dead if you can find it. Because it's the best typing tutor ever.
- System Shock 2 (again, if you can find it), aside from the graphics, the gameplay stands up really well today. If you're co-oping through you'll need to be sharing your resources and working together to specialise your characters to be able to handle whatever situations you come across.
- Gears of War, which was made for co-op, and is pure testosterone laden with ridiculous gore.
- SWAT 4: My own personal recommendation as one of the best co-op games ever made. But it's not for everyone, so tastes may vary. Tactical police sim where every room is a potential deathtrap, and every punk with a gun could be your end. You do things slow, follow procedure, and your objective is to save lives. It's awesome, and working together is a must if you're going to make it out OK.
- Shadowgrounds and Shdowgrounds: Survivor. Top-down "Smash TV" style shooters. The co-op is only available when playing on the same machine unfortunately, no online multiplayer. But they're really good games and well worth playing through with someone.
- Half-Life 2 with the Synergy mod is an awesome co-op experience (well, HL2 is awesome anyway, you'd probably want to play through that first otherwise you might be spoiling the game).
- Doom 3 with co-op mod (can't remember the name). No real worry about spoiling the game since the plot and stuff isn't really all that special.
- Call of Duty: World at War: Haven't played it myself, but I know it's got co-op
For competitive games:
RTS's again:
- Company of Heroes: Extremely awesome WWII RTS. By the makers of the Dawn of War series, so it's squad level control of units and tanks. One of the best WWII games ever made, and personally I'd say it's THE best, but I'm in the minority on that one.
- Supreme Commander: At the complete opposite end of the RTS spectrum, SupCom sees less micromanagement of units, more focus on large theatres where you're waging war across entire continents with hundreds of units. Battles play out across land, sea and air, often simultaneously.
- Sins of a Solar Empire: Good for lower spec machines. Since is a slower paced, galaxy spanning RTS that takes a lot of the basic elements from turn based 4X games like Galactic Civilisations and puts them into a realtime setting.
- Total War series: Control your empire across the decades and centuries, in-depth diplomacy and empire building combine with hugely detailed battles to make a stratgey game that's pretty unparalleled in scope.
FPS's aren't generally competitive for two players unless you're talking deathmatch or other modes. And those are usually more fun with groups larger than two. Alternatively join up with the rest of us for Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead, I can all but guarantee fun times ahead if you jump in with us. Don't worry about being new, just as long as you give people a heads up that this is your first time playing these games online, most people are more than happy to show you the ropes. We even have our own dedicated TF2 and L4D servers.
If you narrow down what she's into I might be able to get a better list going.
Sadly enough, most females just play casual internet games. WoW is more acceptable to females because it's gotten a lot more casual friendly, and it's a more social-able experience with guilds and a community to interact with.
I don't think many of the games subedii listed has a big female audience
Personal experience is that Action RPG's are a very good starting point, which is where Dungoen Siege 2 comes in. It helps that the Dungeon Siege games are actually pretty streamlined, they cut out as much of the extraneous stuff as they could and left the core gameplay (DS1 was even simpler to play). Top-down shooters like Shadowgrounds are often good too. FPS's can be a bit harder to get into, but Half-Life and Portal are usually good things to try initially (Portal in particular). Not co-op, but it's a start, and once you've got the basic FPS skill set it's easy to move on to other things. If you go for immediate action instead, Serious Sam is definitely your man, and great in co-op.
RTS's are more tricky, but I think Red Alert 3 would be worth starting off with, especially since it's got the camp fun factor going for it. Dawn of War 2 is more serious, but it helps that you're only directly controlling two squads in co-op.
Beyond that though, we can't really say since I have no idea how into her games she is or what types of games interest her in general.
If you don't mind the lack of co-op or competitive, the Sims is pretty much the staple. IIRC it has a 50% female audience, which is pretty rare for most standard commercial games outside of the Wii / DS (and the Sims was bringing in the crowds long before those two).
I thought the same thing, and thought my girlfriend would love Littlebigplanet. She thought it was boring. She always takes the controller off me when I play Battlefield Bad Company though. She loves shooting people in it.
I'd also give a personal recommendation for indie developed adventure game "Scratches". It's about an author who sets about trying to unravel the mystery of the house he's moved into, and what happened to the previous occupants. Very old skool (you see the house is in first person, but movement takes place in "blocks" with the view shifting to each new scene. It's not a 3D game so much as a collection of stills), but I really enjoyed the game, I found myself surprisingly involved in the mystery of what was happening.
EDIT: Although looking for the website, it seems the company may not be distributing it anymore. Hmmm.
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=88685
Getting anyone as involved as you are in your own hobby is usually a lost cause in general (let me tell you how hard it is to get my gun-owning buddies to come out to a match...) but I had great fun sitting my wife on my lap and playing Peggle against each other, or looking over her shoulder to solve an Obulis puzzle. You might have to think outside the box, though the OP's girl may be different.
What do you think the R and T stand for in RTS?
Goddamnit. Well it's tactical, at least.
My fiancee and I have enjoyed all of their lego games:
Lego Star Wars 1 + 2
Lego Indiana Jones
Lego Batman
They also made two "Chronicles of Narnia" games that are in a vaguely similar vein. The first one is fiendishly difficult (for a kid's game). My fiancee doesn't game much except with me and I had to carry her through it. We own the 2nd but are still a little leary of trying it.
I've also stockpiled "Marvel: Ultimate Alliance" and "X-Men 2: Legends" so that she and I can play them co-op, but we're still unlocking stuff on Lego Batman.
As for separate machine co-op, there's a bunch of Bioware/Black Isle/Obsidian fantasy RPGs where one can play through the campaign in co-operative multiplayer;
Baldur's Gate 1+2
Icewind Dale 1+2
Neverwinter Nights 1+2 (NWN1 has an awful main campaign, but hordes of user-created modules that are multiplayer friendly, NWN2 has a great main campaign but I think it has a few quirks in multiplayer)