Ladies and gentlemen this is the first blog entry I've ever done and I wanted to address something that I think has whittled down through the development of online gaming. You see I've played games since I was pretty much born, my dad had bought a Sega Master system which he played while tending to me when I was a couple of months old. I liked the colours he says but really it was just so he could unwind and spend time with his son. At 3 years old (1992 and the year my younger sister was born) I was old enough to be able to play with a controller and at that time I was playing sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega Mega Drive.

Now skip a few years and with the Playstation out was the first console that I owned myself and not inherited off my dad. Some of the first games I got Tomb Raider (1+2), Mortal Kombat trilogy are the ones I remember most fondly, though Mortal Kombat completely own me. During this time I had a good group of friends (who I still hang out with) and we'd go to each others houses and play to death every multiplayer game there was. Many years were spent playing Crash team racing, Perfect dark and Golden Eye before it, having loser goes off if more then four of us came over at once. We even played single player games together; Soul Reaver for one was one that we played together figuring out each of the bosses' weaknesses and finding the hidden glyph shrines. Through my high school years we'd hook consoles up and play Halo 2 eight player (12 if we were all available) into the night (usually finishing a session at midnight).

However those days are far behind, my friends have gone to universities up and down the country and now we have online multiplayer. I'm not saying that online capability is a bad thing, what I'm saying is that it's a bad thing if it's the only way to play with your friends. To my knowledge Halo 3 is the only multiplayer game that supports 4 player splitscreen and online play at the same time, If I want to play modern warfare with my friends I can't simply throw them a controller and they jump into online multiplayer the next time I'm in a lobby if they want to play they need to go home and play from there. I don't think removing splitscreen from games is a good idea; it excludes people who may not own a console but would like to play when they come over.

In my mind games should always add, not take away from what its successors had. Co-op hasn't suffered the same fate as splitscreen which intrigues me, why keep one and throw away the other? Now one answer could be simply balance issues for example if one of four players were placed on the opposite team, the other three would have an advantage over the other team simply because three of a six man team (going by halo 3) can see through the eyes of one of the six enemies they're facing. But really that is just bad match making and not the players' faults, match making so that it perfectly fits several groups of four into games perfectly should really of been the correction if that was the problem.

What do you, the reader think about splitscreen? Should it be excluded from games (online or offline)?