Board 8 > Ranking my top 25 Multiplayer experiences of all time

(+) Yeah! (+)

to clarify, this is not the 25 multiplayer experiences I think are the best. It's not an objective ranking. These are 25 that had some sort of impact on me personally, either because I enjoyed them, or because they were significant to my life, etc.

anyway here we go

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Nice

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Tag

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25. Soulcalibur (1998)
System: Arcade
Played with: Girlfriend, strangers

When I was a kid, there was an arcade in my local mall, and about once a week my dad would take me there and would let me spend a few bucks playing games. To be honest, I don't remember most of them. I recall a robot mech game that I didn't really understand, a boxing game, DDR of course but I never touched that. I spent a lot of time on Air Hockey, though I don't quite think that'll count for this list. What I always gravitated towards was the fighting games. I wasn't very good at them, but I loved the big, unique rosters. One of my favorite series has always been Soul Calibur. I've owned just about every game in the series on home consoles. I was torn between this and SC3 for this list. While of course they're not the objective best, 3 was most likely I spent the most time on on my PS2. But cut to a few years ago, I was out on a pizza date at a local shop, and to my surprise they just happened to have an original Soulcalibur arcade cabinet set up there. My eyes lit up immediately, and playing it made me feel like a kid again. I knew every character (Kilik, Rock and Maxi have always been my go-tos), and it still felt just as natural almost two decades later.

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tag, good start. used to just pop in and play a couple matches in that map, Risk-type mode.

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Tag

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Tag

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good thread idea

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24. Crash Team Racing (1999, 2019)
Systems: PS1, PS4
Played with: My mom's friends' kids, my gf, random strangers online

My memories of the original Crash Team Racing are vague, but all positive. I never owned a PS1, but every once in a while when I was little, my mom would take me to visit her friend's house (who occasionally served as my babysitter) and while I was never friends with her kids by any stretch, I did play a decent bit of Crash Team Racing with them. I don't remember much aside from maining Tiny Tiger and having a blast endlessly rushing around N. Sanity Beach. Jump 20 years later and CTR:NF is just everything I remember it being and so much more. It's more than I or any other CTR fan ever could've hoped for, with much, much, much more in terms of characters, tracks, content and polish. After being fairly disappointed by Team Sonic Racing (another racing game I was anticipating around the same time), this game was just refreshingly excellent, and I actually found myself consistently getting better at it.

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CTR:NF is crazy good, I need to get back into it. I got turned off by all the Activision microtransaction crap, but they nailed the gameplay so perfectly that you can't be too mad.

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Used to be play CTR and the other Crash games with my mom all the time, great memories there.

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23. The Jungle Book (1993)
System: Sega Genesis
Played with: my mom

This ranking is 100% based on very vague nostalgia from when I was very, very young. The Sega Genesis was probably my first system (my dad had an NES I didn't use much and I eventually had a Game Boy). On that Genesis, I had an arcade classic game with Pong/Centipede/Galaga, Aladdin, a TMNT game I liked but that usually didn't work, and The Jungle Book. For whatever reason, of everything on that system, the thing I remember the most is taking turns playing the first level of The Jungle Book over and over because I was like 5 and terrible at video games. The boss at the end of the first level was Kaa the snake, who was a pain to take on. The game itself was probably not very good! I vaguely recall it as being a DKC-like platformer where you mostly jump over things traversing the jungle, but beyond that it's mostly a blur; it makes this list solely for being probably the only time I've ever played video games with my mom, who since then hasn't cared for them. At the time, it was fun, even with us losing over and over.

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Tag

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I had that along with The Lion King, I have good memories of both. Don't remember how far I got but I didn't beat either of them.

Genesis had some pretty solid games. There was a good while where I had around ten of them and they were all I played.

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22. World of Warcraft (2004)
System: PC
Played with: Strangers online, along with some of my dad's friends

World of Warcraft is a weird, fuzzy time of my life. During my dad's last 2 or so years, he got very into the game. Unlike my mom, he was a big fan of games, but he worked two jobs to afford a shabby 3rd floor apartment in the city and didn't have the time or the money to keep up with gaming as a real hobby. Except with WoW. When my dad got into an interest, he really got into it. With Harry Potter, he owned a copy of every book and got me a copy as well, all in hardback. We saw every movie in theaters together, ending with the 5th. He was a regular on forums and would enthusiastically relay fan theories to me. With WoW, he was the same way, knowing what weapons to go for and what quests were best and would get his friends to give me free gold to help me start a character of my own. For a while, I became obsessed too. When I visited him, we would spend much of the weekend taking turns playing on his desktop PC (which he used almost exclusively for WoW). I had never played an MMO before; the interaction with other players, the massive open world, it was all just wild for a young 2000s teen to take in for the first time, and I loved it.

My dad died in 2008, when I was 15. I remember being the one to cancel his WoW account. I remember writing the reason for cancelling the account. I don't remember what happened to that old computer. I never played the game again.

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lurking on this topic

nice to see soulcalibur on it already

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1. That week Board 8 discovered Transformice

Kaa is actually the boss of the second level of that Jungle Book game, but the first level doesnt have a boss so that may be why you remembered it differently. Its certainly not a terrible game but not great. Its a European-designed platformer with all the design decisions that usually entails

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WazzupGenius00 posted...

That week Board 8 discovered Transformice

F yeah

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21. LittleBigPlanet 2 (2011)
System: PS3
Played with: my girlfriend

There will be a handful of games on this ranking I played with my girlfriend, mostly fun, goofy platformers (just missing the list was Rayman Legends, which we enjoyed but never finished). Consider this ranking a little all-inclusive of the LBP series, because we played all 3 together (I don't think we ever finished 3 though). 2 was just by far the most fun and most memorable, expanding on everything 2 did with new, memorable gadgets, worlds and side characters. We probably spent as much time playing the Basketball minigame as we did with the rest of the game combined, and it was so fun it could've been a whole game on its own and I wouldn't have complained (it was like normal basketball, except with the ability to also pick up and throw other players as well as the ball, leading to hilarious chaos). It's just an easy game to love.

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Transformice is multi-player in a nutshell. When it was first discovered it was wonderful havoc. It only took a week for people to figure out strats and cheesing (har har) it to make it not fun

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haxball

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20. Unreal Tournament (1999), Counter-Strike (2000) & Halo: Combat Evolved (2001)
System: The computers at my high school
Played with: the other students in my electronics class

I have no conceivable way of differentiating these three experiences in my head, because to me, they were all experience. In high school, I took two semesters of Electronics (I and II). The class had a desktop computer for each student (probably around 15 in the class) that were necessary for the bulk of the work. Well, the teacher of the class was pretty laid back, and had a rule that if you finish all the work for a given class, you can play a game on the computer until the bell rings (which, if we were lucky, was about 10 minutes). I was one of the brighter students in the class, which meant I was typically one of the first onto the computers to grab weapons and find good sniper spots on our LAN games. At first it was just UT, which was basically just a race to see who could get the rocket launcher, then eventually CS became the go-to game, with easy-to-join matches and different team-based game modes. Halo matches consisted almost entirely of sniper shootouts from opposite sides of Blood Gulch, with at least one person always tried to run over people with the Warthog. It was mostly mindless competitive fun and a much-needed break from school at the time.

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19. Tony Hawk's Underground 2 (2004) and American Wasteland (2005)
System: PS2
Played with: my little sister

I got into the Tony Hawk series a little late, not playing it until the Undergrounds came out for PS2, but I loved it immediately. It didn't feel like a sports game as much as it felt like an adventure game where you could never really stop moving much, kinda like the 3D Sonic games. While later I did go back and try out the Pro Skaters (and I'm in fact currently playing through the remake) the much goofier and over-the-top later entries will also hold a special place in my heart, with their goofy and over-the-top characters and stages and challenges. The Underground games were basically Tony Hawk mixed with Jackass, while American Wasteland was its own teen movie story, and both were a blast. One of my best memories of the game was playing them with my sister. I could always beat her in terms of score/comboes, but things like tag and grafitti modes were pretty much fair game, and we had a blast jamming to the distinct hip-hop/punk/ska mix in the background. Perhaps my favorite memory of it was my sister (who was <10 years old at the time) constantly asking me to play "the Pepsi song" (referring to Institutionalized by Suicidal Tendencies).

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Had a similar experience with playing Halo on Blood Gulch during class, but in middle school lol

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18. Tekken 4 (2001)
System: PS2
Played with: my little sister

I KNOW Tekken 4 is considered by many to be the worst in the series. I don't care. It's the game that really introduced me to the series, beyond a couple stray matches in arcades prior. It's the Tekken I put by far the most hours into. I fell in love with the cast, the goofiness, the music (goddamn, the music!) and I've been a fan of the series ever since.

The trouble with Tekken games (and all fighting games, really) is that I suuuuuuck at them. Which is a damn shame, because I LOVE fighting games. Soul Calibur, Tekken, Mortal Kombat, Injustice, MvC, I always buy them, play through what little story there is, and drop the games not too long after, because even though I love the games for their worldbuilding and characters and style, I never really get better at them and playing online against opponents who will beat me in near-perfects almost every time just isn't very enjoyable. As I've gotten older, I've found it's much harder to actually play fighting games with people I know rather than random matchmaking online, and even if I can pull it off, there's always still a big skill difference that stops them from being fun for long.

That was what left such a positive impression on me with Tekken 4. Me and my sister were on close to even ground. Neither of us had much experience with fighters, and while I was generally better at games than she was, she was still often able to beat me at Tekken 4. I learned every character on the cast (my favorite was Violet, who isn't even really a character in his own right). We played for weeks on end, and since then, I've played dozens of fighting games and haven't ever really recreated that same feeling

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btw sorry if this is updating slowly. This is really more of a journaling thing than a regular ranking, in case that isn't already obvious

17. Halo 3 (2007)
Console: Xbox360
Played with: my oldest friend, and some of his friends

I'm ranking this as Halo 3, but honestly, this could be any of them. I've played all of them, which is impressive given that I've never owned an Xbox. My close friend was, however, a very big Halo fan, and anytime a new game in the series came out, we would end up playing through the story together. I couldn't tell you which story goes to which game tbh; I didn't pay all that much attention to the plots and mostly just enjoyed playing through the combat together. I think 3 was my favorite, but it's a little hard to say for sure. One day when I went to visit him, he had a few other friends over that I didn't know. Each had brought their own Xbox and they had them set up on various TVs, all playing what I THINK was Halo 3 but might've been 4. It was the first LAN party I'd had since high school. It's weird, because I never think of Halo as a series I'm like a fan of, despite putting signficantly more hours into the series than other games I like more. I wasn't great at the multiplayer but I wasn't bad either; I remember liking the blue sticky grenades and the gravity hammer, and really just viewed the games as mindless fun.

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Halo 3 was the first game I played on Xbox Live, customs were the SHIT back then, Undead, Speed, great memories there.

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16. Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing Transformed (2012)
System: PS3, Wii U, PC
Played with: sister, girlfriend, friend, B8

Mario Kart be damned, this is the ultimate kart racing experience. Wide variety of characters and an even wider variety of tracks which are all incredible recreations of levels from games that at the surface level seem like they would have nothing to do with each other. Until Nintendo inevitably puts out a Smash Bros. Kart someday, this will remain the #1 crossover kart. For a few years, this was my go-to game to play when I had friends over. I first tried it when renting it for PS3 from GameFly, and loved it. A year or so later, I bought it to play with my friend whenever he came over (previously we had been playing a lot of Mario Kart 8, and I wanted the upgrade). I eventually ended up with a 3RD copy on PC from one of those "pay $10 to have every Sonic game ever made" bundles they had on Steam, and played it with a bunch of people from B8 over discord. Vastly different experiences, and they were all a blast. The game is just always fun.

Also can we talk about this fucking remix because goddamn I'll never get this song out of my head

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctdUDUgxIqs

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All Star Racing Transformed is the goat kart racer. The singleplayer/coop is legit and the last few challenges are actually really tough. Fuck that underground sewer level tho. The arrows are so hard to see and react to, it's only playable if you know the layout

edit - oh shit just realized that track is from the level i'm talking about

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also slight nod goes to the House of the Dead level for also being frustratingly difficult in some of the drifts you need to do correctly

god i love that game

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Aecioo posted...

All Star Racing Transformed is the goat kart racer. The singleplayer/coop is legit and the last few challenges are actually really tough. Fuck that underground sewer level tho. The arrows are so hard to see and react to, it's only playable if you know the layout

edit - oh shit just realized that track is from the level i'm talking about

oh yeah Burning Depths is a brutal track difficulty wise, so at least when you're losing at its near impossible challenges you can listen to some amazing music

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CTR Nitro-Fueled would get my vote for best kart racer, but I definitely wouldn't argue too hard with anyone that prefers All-Stars Transformed.

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15. Guitar Hero: World Tour (2008)
System: Wii
Played with: my little sister, some friends I can't remember too well

There's a rather sad story leading up to how I ended up getting Guitar Hero: World Tour, but I think I'll actually skip that here. I'd played through 2 and 3, between friends houses and arcades, but World Tour was really where I started to love the series. Me and my sister split the game, and played through it together, overjoyed by the newfound ability to sing or drum. The soundtrack (like many of the Guitar Hero soundtracks) was fantastic, and there was plenty there for us to love (in particular, at the time I was a huge fan of SOAD's "BYOB" and Bullet for My Valentine's "Scream Aim Fire"). Since we had the instruments, we went on to get Rock Band 2, Guitar Hero 5 (and Van Halen, which came with it for free), Guitar Hero: Metallica, Green Day: Rock Band (which I'm tempted to place in its own spot simply due to being such a huge fuckin Green Day fan). We even went on to eventually get both DJ Heros. I'm kinda cheating by squeezing them all into this one slot, as they're very similar experiences in a lot of ways. Most importantly, they were a way for me to bond with my little sister over our (at the time) similar music tastes

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Tag

14. Portal 2 (2011)
System: PS3
Played with: a random stranger

I don't need to tell anyone on this board how good of a game Portal 2 is. It's writing, humor, mechanics, etc. all work beautifully. And given how good the first Portal was, this didn't really surprise me. What DID surprise me was how well the multiplayer worked out, or perhaps just how lucky I got when playing it. This was 2011, and I was in high school. I didn't exactly have a whole lot of gamer friends to speak of, so when it came time to try out Portal 2's multiplayer, I had to just go to online matchmaking and hope for the best. My experience in online matchmaking is, as I assume most people's is, shoddy at best. Finding people to stick around for a 10 minute Overwatch match is difficult enough, so by all means getting a random stranger to stick around for hours upon hours of complex co-dependent puzzle solving that required both players to be vocal and cooperative seemed damn near impossible. But it worked, and on my first try I matched with someone who was as enthusiastic to solve all the puzzles and make their way through the mode as I was. We made a shockingly impressive team, and when one of us ran out of time to play hours later, the same guy was willing to make plans with me to finish the mode the next day. I don't even know if I ever learned his name, and if I did I certainly don't remember it, but to this day I am baffled by how random chance landed me with such a perfect co-test subject.

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13. Kirbys Return to Dreamland (2014)
System: Wii
Played with: girlfriend

It may come as a surprise to some of you that I am a fan of the Kirby series. Despite this being a series that seems so family friendly, most of the games in the series are geared toward single-player. Some of the best in the series: Planet Robobot, Triple Deluxe, Nightmare in Dreamland, even all of the Dream Lands. Super Star was multiplayer, unless you were playing it on DS of course. Only a handful of the mainline Kirbys are playable with a partner, and Return to Dreamland is built around this, letting you play as 4 Kirbys, or Kirby and friends (a system that was later expanded on in Star Allies). These games are just a total joy, for reasons that I don't much need to explain here. It's kind of like Mario; everyone's got the gist of what these games are, and either they are your thing or they aren't. Still, it's was so refreshing to get to play through the newest entry of one of my favorite series with a loved one.

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12. Bloodborne (2015)
System: PS4
Played with: my oldest friend

This is the same friend from the Halo 3 entry, and you'll see him again on this list later. We were neighbors and went to the same daycare as kids. I've known him since elementary school and we've been close friends ever since. He moved away when I was in high school, but we still try to keep in touch and play games now and then.

When it comes to the Souls series, I was always only mildly curious. I'd never really been big into the games with punishing difficulty (I mean, come on, I'm a Kirby guy for a reason), nor was I much of a fantasy RPG guy. My friend, on the other hand, was the type to play through every Souls game as many times as it took to memorize the entire world map and become an expert with every build type. He tried to convince me to join him in the series, but I held off... until Bloodborne came out. I'm not a big fantasy RPG guy, but I AM a big surreal lovecraftian horror guy. Bloodborne has a kind of weird multiplayer system that I can't say I was the BIGGEST fan of. What I was a fan of was having someone who had mastered the game all but holding my hand through some of the bigger challenges like the sad baby I was. This also stopped me from missing out on some really cool lore, secrets and side stories that I would've otherwise missed. He made sure I followed every NPC quest, found every optional boss, etc. and while that might seem lame, it was what I needed at the time to really get into it. I eventually got good enough to beat The Bloody Crow Of Cainhurst solo (because you can only do it solo) which was such a rush and showed me how much better I had gotten at the game without even realizing it.

He eventually bought me Dark Souls 2 for my birthday one year, and we played through that together. I went on to play through Dark Souls 3 and Sekiro solo, finally able to do so. Even though they were singleplayer experiences, they still FELT multiplayer because I was able to bond with him over the games.

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I played through Return to Dreamland in the space of one night with my best friend toward the end of high school and it remains one of my fondest gaming memories. Had a falling out with him less than a year after that and anytime I look back on our time spent playing video games (of which there was a lot over many, many years), I think of Smash Melee first but Dreamland a close second. Wonderful game.

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11. Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale (2012)
System: PS3
Played with: random strangers, friends, girlfriend, one guy at my college

Every year, when E3 rolls around, or when there's a Playstation State of Play, or at the Game Awards, there's always one game I'm wishing for more than any other to be announced: Playstation All-Stars 2. PSASBR may have been my most anticipated game of all time in the year leading up to its release (I'll give an HM to Kingdom Hearts III and God of War '18). While I love Smash Bros., I've always been more of a fan of Sony's first party titles than Nintendo's (Kirby aside). God of War, Jak and Daxter, Infamous, LittleBigPlanet, Uncharted... THESE are the games I gravitate toward more than Zelda and Metroid and Fire Emblem. The addition of characters like Heihachi and Big Daddy, 2 other series I considered among my favorites, only elevated my hype that much further.

The game didn't succeed as much as I'd hoped, for multiple reasons. Sony never really gave it the publicity and backing it needed. Many gamers and game "influencers" (lets players and the like) wrote it off as being a Smash Bros. ripoff, while curiously also shunning it for not being enough like Smash Bros. (I distinctly remember disappointment watching GameGrumps play it, hearing Arin insult the game for being a cheap knockoff, and then getting angry at the game when he couldn't win by playing it like Smash). There were some improvements the game needed (primarily it could've used some better balancing and a more modern menu layout.

Still, despite its issues there was SO much to love here. Great crossover levels complete with crossover music tracks, exciting special attacks, detailed alternate costumes for the characters that showed the people working on the game really cared about it (for instance, Jak has 3 costumes, based on his Jak and Daxter, Jak 3, and Jak X: Combat Racing appearances). DLC characters released for free, DLC stages released for free, and so on. There is so, so much potential for this to be the new big crossover series, if people (Sony included) will just give it the chance.

There's not much special to say about its multiplayer experience vs any other fighting game. I played with several different people, and all enjoyed it (though maybe none as much as myself). Online matchmaking was fun for a while, thoguh eventually it got frustrating as the most unbalanced characters (Raiden and Kratos) were the ones always selected, and the online featured a few too many spammers. Perhaps the most memorable experience playing multiplayer happened in college. I had a small friend group there, and happened to find out that a friend of a friend in that group was ALSO a huge PSASBR fan, and so we met up, and despite not knowing this guy well, I went to his dorm (he lived alone in a dorm, which was curious as most dorms were for two people at least) to play with him. I got into the dorm, and it was covered, I mean covered, wall to wall, ceiling to floor, bed, shelves, every square inch covered in My Little Pony merchandise. Anyway, we played and he beat me as Sly Cooper.

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10. Uncharted 4 (2016)
System: PS4
Played with: strangers online

Every once in a while, a multiplayer experience comes along that doesn't seem like it should work, but does, and does so excellently. Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is one that always comes to mind; it's team-based hide-and-seek game was flawed but unlike anything else out there, and I was honestly a little sad to see it never return in future titles. The same thing happened in Uncharted 2. Uncharted 2 was hands down one of the best 3rd-person shooter titles to date, with an amazing story, great characters, smooth gameplay and thrilling set pieces. What didn't get nearly enough attention was the multiplayer mode. I'm almost always the type to choose story mode > online, but something about the multi-level, fast-paced, almost goofy action on the multiplayer kept me coming back.

It was really all-but perfected by the time Uncharted 4 came along, with grappling hooks making the maps even more fun to navigate, and with the humor of the series managing to shine through constantly. One of my favorite moments of online gaming came from this; the game featured a system where you only get partial credit for "downing" an opponent, and once they're downed they can be revived, killed or will die after 15 seconds or so. At one point, I downed an opponent, and instead of killing them, I danced. And without mics or communication of any sort, the entire rest of my team over the next few seconds saw me, ran over, and joined me, dancing in a circle around the dying opponent. The fact that the multiplayer mode had us playing as the heroic characters of the story made the event that much funnier. Something about seeing the wholesome but adventure-loving Elena Fisher twerk above a dying man while surrounded by her friends and allies just brought a sense of joy and camaraderie to my heart that most online games haven't been able to match.

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9. Overwatch (2016)
System: PS4
Played with: girlfriend, coworkers, but mostly strangers

If you told me four years ago that to this day, I would still be picking up Overwatch once every month or so, I wouldn't believe it. It's rare a multiplayer game sticks with me this strong, for this long, but Overwatch was just something special. It's the toxic relationship I can't quit. Every time I think I'm done, I never actually delete it from my system, because I know that no matter how many times I give up on the game out of frustration, I'll just keep coming back. I love the characters. I love how everyone is so distinct and memorable, complete with fleshed out lore and backstories and constantly evolving relationships. I love the little moments. Waving to someone as Roadhog as you watch them fall into the hole in the middle of Ilios. Coming to a silent truce with the other Widowmaker in Deathmatch, where out of some sort of mutual respect you never kill each other no matter how many times you have the chance. Group dancing on top of the flag in capture the flag as a show of inevitable victory. Charging as a Reinhardt, only to get launched into the air by a Junkrat mine, making you fly (still charging) into the ulting mercy and slam her into a wall. When you win, it feels so good, especially when winning with friends. When you lose, it's because the other team played cheap and everyone on your team sucks and the RNG is against you the whole time.

I'm still sad this game didn't feature split-screen (as unfortunately games tend not to anymore), but I still found fun ways to play with my partner. Primarily, playing mystery heroes (or my favorite mode, Mystery Deathmatch) and switching out every time you die. There's something bizarrely addicting about the game I can't quite explain, and even though I'm sick of Overwatch, I'm still hyped for Overwatch 2

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No arguments there, Overwatch is definitely one of the most spectacular MP experiences I've had too. Reaper & Mercy still rank as some of my favorite VG characters. I get a lot of pushback for this opinion but what really killed the game for me was the startling lack of new events every year. One year of recycled events seemed okay at the first since there was an attempt to shake them up then year after year after that it was really just the same thing every time and it got so tedious with nothing to look forward to besides new skins. Eventually even Archives succumbed to this which was the most disappointing of all as I loved learning new bits of lore every year, it was pretty much the last straw that made me stop playing all together, until recently actually. CTF Blitz is hella fun. Still I am looking forward to OW 2 as well especially for the campaign.

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Snake5555555555 posted...

No arguments there, Overwatch is definitely one of the most spectacular MP experiences I've had too. Reaper & Mercy still rank as some of my favorite VG characters. I get a lot of pushback for this opinion but what really killed the game for me was the startling lack of new events every year. One year of recycled events seemed okay at the first since there was an attempt to shake them up then year after year after that it was really just the same thing every time and it got so tedious with nothing to look forward to besides new skins. Eventually even Archives succumbed to this which was the most disappointing of all as I loved learning new bits of lore every year, it was pretty much the last straw that made me stop playing all together, until recently actually. CTF Blitz is hella fun. Still I am looking forward to OW 2 as well especially for the campaign.

Yeah, the characters are great. Reinhardt, Roadhog, Ashe/BOB and even Tracer (who I love but am terrible with) are all among my favorite characters now. And I actually agree with that, seeing the same events reused year after year really killed my interest a good bit, especially with no single-player mode to fall back on or anything like that. Now when I go back, it's for shorter and shorter amounts of time, and when I play it's usually just deathmatch, though I also love CTF Blitz.

I will say the new mode they introduced this event was a nice step in the right direction, as the mode is fun, but also barely playable, as it only has 6 players, and goes too long, so literally half of all games I've played in the mode have ended pre-emptively like 8 minutes in because of too many people leaving the match.

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Tag

good thread

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I took like a three year break from Overwatch and have just gotten back into it over the past month or two, and it's so incredibly fresh. I probably last played right around the release of Doomfist so hopping back in with all these new maps, skins, and characters has made the game feel almost new.

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8. The Jackbox Party Packs 1-7 (2014-2020)
System: PS4, Discord, Twitch
Played with: friends, both irl and on B8

I own every Jackbox Party Pack, and every year I look forward to the new pack of party games. There's really no equal when it comes to pick-up-and-play video games for groups of people who aren't necessarily gamers. I've done this with small friend hangouts, with larger parties at my home, with my tabletop group, and more than all, with Board 8. Whether hosting or joining in, Board 8 Jackbox nights are always just a fun time. Hell, there are people on this board that I mostly only interact with via Jackbox. Quiplash, Drawful, Bracketeering, You Don't Know Jack, Trivia Murder Party, TeeKO, and so on... the games are hilarious, and often those playing along are as well (and sometimes they aren't, but it's still fun). Jackbox with this board has become less of a game and more of a way to connect with the board's community, like catching up with old friends over drinks. It's been years of good times with ideally years more to come.

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7. Kirby Air Ride (2003)
System: Gamecube
Played with: Oldest friend

Kirby Air Ride has been #1 on my list of most-wanted game remakes for years now (though I would also be more than happy with a sequel). There isn't another game quite like it. Not content just being a kart racing game (which it absolutely succeeds at), Kirby Air Ride really shines with City Trial, a mini open-world adventure on a map full of vastly different locales all squeezed tightly together, full of hidden secrets and unlockables. Things you found in the map could alter your following races or they could alter your game altogether. But the secrets were really only a bonus, because the map is just so damn fun to navigate, especially given that you can pick up various Kirby powers to attack your opponent, not just in races, but in fun exploration. Everything in this game is just a blast, and it only becomes more fun as you go on. While many of the karts are typical of what you might see in a kart-racer to some extent, then you unlock things like the Wheelie Bikes and Meta Knight (who doesn't even use a kart, instead just flying through the stages). I loved the game so much that years back I drew City Trial as a Smash Bros. stage:



and then let's talk about the music because goddamn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KamjTqi4VjI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=begvoKpL-TM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTOt8uUBj4A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0-TRGMg9R8

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6. Castle Crashers (2008)
System: Xbox 360 I think
Played with: oldest friend

Jump back about a decade and a half. I lost my dad in 2007. Shortly after, my best friend moved away. Things were weird for a while there until he managed to get his own place in Gettysburg, a little over an hour from where I lived at the time. It took a while before I got the chance to go up and see him (I was 16 and hadn't been driving long, so making that trek seemed intimidating). When I did, everything felt really odd, but the way we connected and made things feel normal were the same way we always had. With video games. He recently got Castle Crashers, a game I thought looked neat, so we booted it up.

We played through the entire game in one sitting, probably about 10 hours straight. It was a fucking blast. The game is hilarious and just really goddamn fun, with some of the best beat-em-up gameplay I've experienced. I don't think I'd ever played through a game in a way like this; it was like marathoning a show the whole way through, bouncing from castles to deserts to swamps in a never-ending flurry of goofy hijinks and physical humor. It was exactly the right game at the right time and holds a special place in my mind because of it.

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Castle Crashers was a lot of fun

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knocking the top 5 to page 2

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