My cur­rent ques­tion is this: why are there few (if any!) ca­su­al/par­ty mul­ti­play­er games for the PC? I’ve been look­ing around for games that might ap­peal to more than just me and my hard­core gam­ing friends, in a (per­haps vain) at­tempt to cre­ate so­cial gath­er­ings through video games/LAN par­ties. Be­cause ev­ery­one here at school has a com­put­er, and net­work­ing is al­ready very-well tak­en care of, it’s def­i­nite­ly very plau­si­ble. The on­ly things miss­ing now are the games.

Cur­rent­ly, I play a fair amount of Call of Du­ty, which is an ex­cel­lent PC FPS. I prefer it over other mul­ti­play­er PC shoot­ers sim­ply be­cause I think CoD’s gun fir­ing sounds and an­i­ma­tions are much more grat­i­fy­ing. Okay, that’s a lit­tle ex­ag­ger­at­ed: Call of Du­ty is an in­cred­i­ble, pol­ished game with many very good ele­ments. Its mul­ti­play­er is ex­cel­lent when you’re play­ing on com­put­ers that al­ready have the game in­stalled, and with peo­ple that have played shoot­ers be­fore. With both the­se com­po­nents lack­ing, how­ev­er, Call of Du­ty is not a par­tic­u­lar­ly ef­fec­tive mul­ti­play­er ex­pe­ri­ence.

I’m cur­rent­ly look­ing for games that are easy to pick up, can be played in a very short amount of time, and have fair­ly small in­stal­la­tion foot­prints (or bet­ter yet, can be played from a CD or the net­work). Those qual­i­ties, in my opin­ion, will make a game that is much more ac­ces­si­ble than to­day’s games, and will turn video gam­ing in­to a much more in­clu­sive and ul­ti­mate­ly more so­cial­ly suc­cess­ful ac­tiv­i­ty.

Babo Vi­o­lent 2 comes close. It’s small and very, very sim­ple for a shooter. Ob­vi­ous­ly it doesn’t work with peo­ple who don’t en­joy shoot­ing other peo­ple, but it’s about as close to a “par­ty game” as I can think of for the PC. Game con­soles have it bet­ter in this re­spect: Mar­io Par­ty, for ex­am­ple, or DDR, or Gui­tar Hero (although those games have ac­quired some­thing of a hard­core cult sta­tus as well) are good ex­am­ples. I sup­pose I’ll just have to wait pa­tient­ly here for ca­su­al PC gam­ing to catch up and provide us with more ac­ces­si­ble par­ty games.