It began with PlayStation One, more specifically with Metal Slug. My cousin and I both got the PlayStation at roughly the same time, and whenever he came to our house, we mostly played Metal Slug, and when I went over to their house, we still mostly played Slug but also some FIFA or Taken, which I hated cause I was never, and still am not, a competitive player or person really.
Time passed, and more than a decade later, we both moved on from PlayStation and got potato PCs instead; I say potato cause they didn't even have a GPU in them, therefore our options were very limited. But we didn't give up on it after he got a relatively decent laptop, we settled down on playing Command & Conquer: Generals Zero Hour, a strategic game that to this day, I feel like is one of my favorite games of all time, not top ten tho!
That was the majority of my gaming experience until around a year ago, when I got my gaming PC, and the highlight of my Co-Op journey is this period of time. We tried a bunch of different games in different genres together, some we played for dozens of hours, and others, less than an hour, till we uninstalled them.
My partner in crime for all these games is my cousin, from Metal Slug on PS1 all the way to Elden Ring and the most recent one, PEAK. It's nice to have a single Co-Op partner to try out different games together and know their strength and weaknesses when it comes to gaming, or so I thought!
You can already guess where this is going, yes, a few days ago, I finally had enough and decided to take a break from Co-Op AND PvP gaming altogether and only play single player games. Why, you ask? I don't know where to start. For PvP games, that's a topic for another day, and I'll probably make a video about it on YouTube and will also post it on Hive, but for now, let's just focus on CoOp gaming.
One of the hard truths that I learned in the past few months is that just because you had common interests as kids doesn't mean you'll have the same interests or hobbies when you grow up, or even like the same genre of video games anymore, and unfortunately, that's what happened with me & my cousin. We spent countless hours finding what to play together, and sometimes we both made compromises and found a middle ground to play a game that neither of us loved, but found interesting enough to give it a try. But our taste seems to grow more and more far apart until, well, there's no common ground to be found and settled on anymore.
The last straw happened when we found this game called 'Abussus' and after yet another few hours of debating on what to play, decided to get this game and just try it out tomorrow, cause it was 1 am already. Came tomorrow and we hopped on the game and played for half an hour until it was lunch time, and decided to take a break. The game was fine. Nothing too special, but I enjoyed it enough to keep playing for at least a couple more hours; but when we got back from the break, he said he already deleted it and went to play Project Zomboid to wash the boredom. And that was our last gaming session together. A week has passed, and I concluded that our taste in games is too different to find a game that we both enjoy, and that's just how it is, and there's no point in overthinking it.
Instead of sulking over it, I decided to try more single-player games and enjoy some offline, story-driven games like Ratchet and Clank! I know, weird choice. And so far, it's been great actually! I missed the feeling of immersion and not worrying about how you compare to someone else, or relying on your friend to take the game seriously and stop shooting and laughing about it when friendly fire is on!
I'm happy with this decision so far, and I'm looking forward to playing some master pieces like The Witcher 3 and God of War Ragnarok all by myself! (I have played the first one and loved it!
I'll appreciate it if you share your Co-Op experiences with me in the comments, and also tell me about your favorite single-player games so I can add them to my list!