PixlBit

On Monday this week I picked up some under $5 games to try online co-op on PS3 now that my friend and I both have the system and he has no ID problems there (I also picked up a Dreamcast memory card and a copy of Sega Bass Fishing for him since he misplaced them. They were both under $10 at Jay Street Video Games, my go-to source for all things retro). Here's the result of my efforts.                          

             

Haze - A fun PS3 exclusive FPS from 2008. We played this co-op back then and it was fun. It's by Free Radical who did the Timesplitters games and they nailed the controls, but the servers down. We could play via LAN though, that is, when I hook up an ethernet cable. It was too much bother at the moment so I moved on.

                          

Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom - A fun Gauntlet-like hack 'n slash that was the main reason I got a PS3 way back when. Mark and I played it back then but never finished it since it got rudely too hard. It was a release game for PS3 and exclusive to it, but like Haze, the servers were no longer active. There was no LAN feature either, only local co-op was supported. Couch co-op is a thing of the distant past. I wasn't going to go back to that! Onward!

                            

Brink - The game was described to me as similar to Titan Fall. It's mainly a multiplayer FPS game but with a story mode. You play as one of four player classes that are the typical ones. One good thing is you can switch your class midgame by hooking into computers. You can level up and gain new boosts to your abilities and gain equipment and weapon parts.

The servers were still up so we played this co-op for a few levels. Even the campaign feels a lot like an arena style multiplayer shooter. The AI is jittery like a multiplayer game too - hard to hit a target that keeps jukin' and jivin' about. It's easy to get lost in the levels too because there's no map and the levels are full of dead ends. You just have an objective point indicator which doesn't help much. I ended up following my AI team mates most of the time. It was mostly unpleasant and my buddy Mark didn't like it either.

I had one copy of Conflict Denied Ops and put that in to see if the servers were up for online co-op. They seemed to be and the game played fine solo. It will be a fun run-and-gun shooter for online co-op when I get a second copy.

                           

                   My new setup. Gotta a blue theme going. Gen before that was silver.

And that was it for online co-op on PS3 that day. My buddy Mark and I played EDF 2025 on Xbox 360 solo and in tandem the rest of the night to learn more about the game and to collect more armor and weapons for when we can play online co-op again. I was playing the levels at as high a difficulty as I could and got really frustrated with the Wing Diver. I think, with her low armor, she's much better when other players are in the game. Your AI team mates don't do much to keep the hoards off you while you snipe. I switched to Ranger class and what a blast that was - literatly. The Ranger's weapons create a huge amount of collateral damage and are really fun to use. The only issue with him is slow movement, but I learned the skill of dive rolling around to speed him up.

I got through the first 17 levels or so, mostly on Hardest difficulty. After around level 12 though, the game gets tougher and I played on Hard instead. Hard was fairly easy with my level 38 weapons I got from playing previous levels on Inferno and Hardest. I was frequently tempted to ratchet it up to Hardest again, but my armor was only at 300, and some levels where there are spiders that grab you with their silk threads can be really tough without high armor. So I'm grabbing as much armor and weapon drops as I can on Hard to make myself strong for Hardest and Inferno. Most of the achievements in the game are for finishing all 95 or so levels at each of the difficulty settings for each of the four character classes. I'm going to go for that.