Wesley Fenlon | Not with a bang but a whimper.

Fez, I have a confession to make. I’ve been watching you from afar for over a year, peeking over the top of whatever I’m reading to catch an innocuous glance as you pass by. Just an innocent look, really. But I started to feel something. And then, just as quickly as you entered my life, you disappeared. I thought these feelings would go away. I thought the emptiness of the long, long months since I last saw you would temper my emotions. It didn’t. And it got hard, some nights. I’m a little ashamed to admit it — I mean, I don’t know exactly how to say this — but sometimes I had to watch videos of you on the internet. I just had to see you again. And now you’re back in my life. This time, I caught only the briefest glimpse. Barely a minute. You’re playing with me, aren’t you? Toying with my heart? Well, it doesn’t matter. You had me from the very start.

Fez, I think I love you.

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I dedicate most of my gaming time these days to shooters for a number of reasons. There’s something incredibly rewarding about the skill-based competitive atmosphere of neck-and-neck multiplayer matches, and I enjoy a good game of free-for-all — but not nearly as much as I delight in team-based games, where coordination and collaboration are key to victory. Apparently, I’m not alone. Alongside the recent proliferation of first- and third-person shooters, partially spurred by the success of the Xbox and Xbox Live, more and more games have been integrating cooperative modes into their campaigns.

Co-op gameplay seems to be the new buzzword for the shooter genre, and its popularity is spreading to other corners of the medium. Games like Fable II and Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 added two-player components to their campaigns, and Capcom clearly intended Resident Evil 5 to be a cooperative experience. Each of these cases represents a traditionally single-player game series that has been adapted or expanded to support an additional person, and the game industry must have remembered that a lot of the time, playing with a friend is even better than playing alone. But what makes the recent co-op surge so interesting is that, even 16 years ago, those same elements were present in Secret of Mana, and Square’s classic manages to deliver a more rewarding cooperative experience than plenty of games published well over a decade later.

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