It's sad that games rely on multiplayer/online play to even be fun. While Brawl and Mario Kart Wii were fun at first playing solo, they're just about impossible to play alone now. I'm an advocate of games that can be equally fun playing either solo or with others. For instance, the new Guild Wars game (Guild Wars 2) is being built so that people can play alone if they want and have just as much fun as they would if playing with others. I was a player of Guild Wars, but when everything was built around level-grinding and PvP and all players shifted to that mean of play, I quit because every ounce of fun was drained. Repetition didn't help either.
Now, the beauty of single-player games is dwindling unfortunately. At least we still have Zelda and Metroid, because those are prime (hawhaw Metroid Prime) examples of great single-player experiences and are built for playing alone only. Why build a game as a "party game" only, when if you could extend the single player experience to be equally as fun, your game would sell even better?
I wholeheartedly agree. I hate games that have to focus on multiplayer to be good. Melee didn't; even though the Smash Bros games have always been great multiplayers, I had fun playing Melee, alone a lot of the time, until the day Brawl came out (and still have fun when I play it). Brawl just doesn't work that way. Sakurai no doubt added gimmicks and such so that it could appeal to casual gamers, and because he didn't want it to be competitive-prone. Unfortunately, whether or not you want to play competitively, that messes up the rest of the game as well. Playing by yourself isn't fun because the gimmicks kill you. When you're playing alone, you're less inclined to say "I don't care if I lose", because unlike when you're playing with friends, all there is is the game. Those kind of gimmicks work great for multiplayer, and single player for about a week.
Thank god we do still have Metroid and Zelda. I was at first, a little upset about Metroid Prime 3 not having multiplayer (mostly because I wanted it to have a great online multiplayer and everything so it could blow Halo 3's sales out of the water), but especially after Hunters, I realize how good of a thing it was that it didn't. I'm upset that, in order to get all of the bonus content, you have to have a friend who can get all of the friend vouchers in the game and exchange with you, because none of my friends own the game. The only one of my friends who really likes Metroid doesn't own a Wii. He was very impressed with Metroid Prime 3, but all he has is an XBox 360. That aside, the fact that the Metroid and Zelda games focus on single player is great. Hunters is the one Metroid game that FOCUSED on multiplayer, and it's just like Brawl--I get the urge to play it once in a blue moon, play two or three matches and put it down. And when I criticize the game, I find people saying "Well its single player wasn't good, but its multiplayer was." First of all, I have one friend who owns the game so there's my multiplayer. Plus, Nintendo's online is notoriously bad and while not awful in Hunters, you find yourself waiting for 5+ minutes for a match. So yeah, it is well-built, but the multiplayer isn't
that good, and the singleplayer is worse than subpar. It doesn't even feel like Metroid. I've never played Halo, but it's probably somewhere similar to that. It had Energy and Missile tanks, and 6 beams. What happened to the other upgrades? You start out with the Space Jump, Morph Ball, Morph Ball Bombs, you don't even have to unlock missiles...it wasn't a very good single player.
In any case, I'll cut my rant short here; multi-player should never be the sole purpose of any game. Single player is very important, even in the age of online gaming.
oision
