Do games NEED multiplayer?

If you want to be able to play one game and one game only for the next year of two of your life, then yes, multiplayer is a necessity. Sure, there are single-person experiences that seem limitless (Spore, The Sims, Tetris) but eventually you need something more. Why do you think the Sims have had expansion after expansion after expansion? In today's A.D.D. world of YouTube and an MTV that has lost it's "M," people need constant, updated stimulation. Online multiplayer is one easy way to accomplish this.

Call of Duty 4, Halo 3, and Call of Duty: World at War - the top three online games on 360. They will remain this way for the forseeable future. CoD 4's single player was great - the scripted action was intense, the characters were believable, and the sense of immersion in the battles was unparalleled. Yet, there is no reason to play it more than once. The experience will always be the same, no matter the difficulty level you select. But online, you can meet new people, and shoot new people. The experience will never be scripted; the experience will never be the same. Online multiplayer has helped WoW become a pop culture phenomenon, and one that's doesn't show any sign of letting up. A game can be fun, but without online multiplayer, there is no reason to keep getting better and better indefinitely. If you invested 200 hours into Final Fantasy XII to get yourself the sweetest, toughest party in RPG history, who will know? Who will care? I sunk 120 hours into Oblivion, and now it just sits on the shelf, collecting dust. At least I got all 1,250 achievement points!

A distant cousin to online multiplayer is the increasing availability of online leaderboards. Rock Band, Mirror's Edge, Mega Man 9, N+, basically every other XBLA game... by getting people to compete with each other to shave half a second off a speed run, single player games are given incredible long term vitality. Mega Man 9 came out months ago, and people are still competing for the top spot on the leaderboards. How many full-budget games can make that claim? Not as many as would like to, that's for sure.

Game Daze

It's time for GameStop's annual Game Days celebration, where they try to shell off a lot of overstocked games by offering up to half off selected titles. I picked up some old ones, including Namco Museum Virtual Arcade for the 360 and Final Fantasy II for the PSP for $15 and $10, respectively.

I like old games. They were simple, they never tried to do too much at once, and you didn't feel bad about setting them down for the night to get some sleep. Yet, they can still be tremendously addictive, especially if you're just a few points shy of the top of the leaderboards. When the first Rock Band came out, I got up to #6 on the Bass Score Duel leaderboards. When you're that close to the top, you make sure you don't lose. If your phone rings, you ignore it. If someone trys to get your attention, you say, "HEY I HAVE A 12X MULTIPLIER HOLD ON I'LL TALK TO YOU IN A MINUTE!" In Call of Duty, if you get shot, you still have a chance to come back and win the match. When you're plucking your fake bass strings, you can't miss. One wrong note and you can lose the song, and then you've wasted hours of work climbing the boards, 1 TrueSkill point at a time. On Rock Band, you didn't know how many hours you had wasted, or how many matches you had played. You knew your TrueSkill score, and your rank on the national leaderboards. Get suckered in, and it's hard to get free.

Everyone wants to be the best.