Power-ups and Bickering

Capitalism!

Besides being the title of this blog, this is what we consider to be one of the core tenants of great cooperative gameplay. Arguing about who gets power-ups and life refills is something that we spent most of our childhood doing. Unfortunately, we haven't seen much of this yet. Joust was far too difficult, and too much attention was spent not killing each other to worry about getting points. Battle City and Ice Climbers had little interaction: the level driven structures of the games, combined with the lack of resources to compete for, made for very little discourse between us outside of commenting on the game. Exed Exes was too inane: our boredom mixed with the relative difficulty resulted very little attention being paid to jockeying for power-ups.

We hit our stride, for the first five games, with Mario Bros. Our previous familiarity with the game, combined with the mechanics, creates plenty of moments of joyful point stealing. Due to the fact that you get points for making the "kill" by running over a defeated enemy, and no points for actually defeating enemies, it is very easy to kill steal from your partner. When this is tied into the fact that points, which are rewarded for defeating enemies, grant extra lives, it means that jumping on your partners head to slow them down becomes personally useful. This extends to the bonus levels, where you are rewarded points based on the number of coins individually collected.

What works so well here, that doesn't occur in other games that we've played so far, is that we are able to get in each others way, make actions that interrupt one another, without completely ruining everything. Joust would have had some fun competition to get points in a hurry, if touching another player didn't equal instant death. Ice Climbers and Battle City lacked any kind of real competition against other players, making for struggle between the players and the game instead of each other. While this is cooperative gameplay by definition, it doesn't create the friendly struggle that is so endearing. Exed Exes, while having all the right elements, including power-ups, just fails to capture the attention at any meaningful level.