Tired of Player-Reliant Gaming

Something has been bothering me lately, and I don't know if it's happened to any of you. Lately, I've been feeling like a lot of games force me to rely on other people to enjoy the game experience. It's like if you own an XBox 360, you really have no choice but to buy LIVE to enjoy those games, and then you are forced to find people to play with that you get along well with.

I've actually been shying away from console games in favor of handheld games, and I enjoy my Nintendo DS Lite more than any other video game system I own. Most of the games on the system are single-player experiences.

My thinking is that, it's not so much that these games have online play, as it is that the gamesaren't as funwithout online play. I can sit down and play Halo 3 ODST Firefight anytime, but to sit and play through the campaign itself seems like one giant chore for me. And I don't like feeling like that. I want games that I feel like completing, and I just haven't ever gotten that on my 360.

MMO's are another exampleI think. Unless you have a group of dedicated friends that like to play the game with you, there really isn't much of a point in playing.

Does anybody else feel this way? Perhaps Nintendo has the right idea by not embracing online play to heavily?

I only take exception when a game I like removes local co op and favours only online, or if it does have local I need a second console. I haven't made many friends on xbox live and in all honesty I tend to end up in groups full of kids when ever I play a shooter (fighters and racers I have more luck with). I take it shooters are the genre you are refering to by the way?

I don't have an XBOX of any kind or PS3, but I agree that the DSs are the way to go for singl;e player enjoyment. There is Wi-Fi, but no one is forcing you to play online.

I think Nintendo made the mistake of not taking online gaming seriously enough. I think there are plenty of single player driven experiences on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. What kind of games you like will have to be taken into consideration of course. I can understand you being someone that doesn't particularly want to play online, but I can't think of any kind of game the those systems fail to offer. I'll givea few examples (not meant in a mean way, just making suggestions).

Xbox 360

Kameo, Banjo Kazooie, Fable 2, Mass Effect games, Gears of War games, Halo games, Alan Wake, Project Gotham games, Forza games

Playstation 3

Metal Gear Solid, Uncharted games, Resistance games, Killzone 2, Ratchet games, Heavy Rain, God of War, Motorstorm games

Then across both of these platforms you can get games like Assassin's Creed, The Orange Box, Grand Theft Auto 4, Red Dead Redemption, Fallout 3, Oblivion, Dragon Age, Resident Evil 5, Bioshock games.

There are a lot of other games I could mentioned, I was just trying to think of games across different genres.