Recently I have been growing increasingly irate with certain gimmicks that seem to be growing in video games. In the past few months I have played through Resident Evil 5 and inFamous, both fantastic games despite one aspect that really, supremely “grinded my gears.” And these two facets of these otherwise wonderful games are the heavy centering on the “Cooperative Experience” in RE5 and the “Moral Choice System” in inFamous. Back in the day I welcomed such additions to the gaming medium. I must say I spent countless hours in the original halo’s co-op just stockpiling grenades and sending warthogs soaring out of the atmosphere, and watching my first Fable character degrade into a horned ifrit was just joy.

However, as time has gone on I’ve found that games are trying to make the co-op experience more centric to the game experience as a whole, rather than an addition to be kept separate from the main experience. And moral choice systems are now a way to have gamers play through a game twice to experience slightly different halves with no middle ground. Maybe I’m just an old school single player enthusiast but when I have to play through all of RE5 while having Sheva follow me like a machine gun wielding puppy I get rather annoyed. Not saying I wouldn’t love to have a machine gun wielding puppy follow me around, but for the purposes of the RE5 game it isn’t ideal.  I love to be able to play with a friend, however, I would prefer if it wasn’t forced upon me.

I guess what I’m trying to get at is I would much prefer a game that is meant to be single-player, to stay single-player. Left for Dead is meant to be a team experience which is why it’s awesome with other people. The Resident Evil series has always been an incredible single player experience, and when they try to hop on the goddamned buddy-system band wagon I get a bit peeved.  Maybe if I had a good teammate on-call all the time to play with over Live I’d be singing a different tune, but when I have a 11 year old eunuch with a broken mic trying to knife zombies to death in order to get some crack-ass achievement as my teammate the gaming experience is cheapened somewhat.

Now onto moral choice systems which is the fresher of the two subjects in my mind. I completed inFamous about a week ago and for those of you who are not in tune with the PS3 side of things you play as an electric-powered superman who must make things right in a shattered city all the while choosing whether you want to be the cities benevolent beneficiary or its “infamous” electrically charged asshole. I opted for the latter because one of the evil powers is an Emperor of the Sith-esque arc lightning, which, when upgraded, makes people explode (and writhe!).

I suppose it was pretty cool that your powers would change depending on what moral choices you make but what annoyed me is that the choices were either on complete dastardly side like sodomizing a little girl or the radiating Christ-goodness side like saving that girl from a fire instead and then showering her with ponies and goodies.  I mean why can’t I choose a healthy medium? But no, it doesn’t work like that, by the end of the game I get to be either the cities righteous savior (bitch) or be its immoral resident super-being who coasts along power lines blowing up cars because it looks cool on his HDTV.

Also when the evil powers tend to be more “flashy” then the good powers I find myself making the “moral” choices based along the thought process of,  “hmm this lightning grenade would look cool if it turned into a cluster lightning grenade!” (which is the evil power) Which leads to me choosing to pump black poison tar into a citizen apartment complex because I’d rather my grenades split into 7 explosive bits rather than just one.

I can’t gripe too much however since I still am playing the game and it is rather good, I just wonder what the game writers were thinking when posing these “powerful moral choices” to the gamer. They are too black and white, wouldn’t you say? A shade of gray would be nice once in awhile. And co-op, ugh co-op, please don’t force me to play with a sub-par computer controlled twat (Sheva) that is integral to the game when I am lacking a competent human to play with. Maybe I’d be happier if the computer controlled twat (Sheva) could die without repercussion, but she doesn’t, so I’m not.