Please allow me to rant for a bit.
Dear game developers. If you make a game that can be played in local CoOp, and you force a single-player non-CoOp tutorial down the throat of anyone who wishes to play the game, then you are an ass and I wish I could piss in your breakfast cereals for the rest of your natural born life.
Had a feel-good weekend with a friendo who has been, once again, feeling down in the dumps. Being a father of a tiny wormling is hard, and the times you can set aside for such a luxurious undertaking are to be counted on one hand.
So, when he opted for Payday 2 for Switch while we sat in his go-to pub I was already feeling a certain amount of dread. That version reportedly ain't the best in terms of support or content (true to form, it would later on crash to "desktop" twice on his switch during the first tutorial mission).
Siiiiiigh. Probably FOUR missions in full-on local-only no-CoOp tutorial? Are these guys serious? My friend couldn't even finish the first one between crashes and newbness (omg no crosshairs fuck me how'd I get detected oh noes body bag throwing is hard), so seemingly mandating more than one mission (with assorted loading screens and other annoyances) is
really pushing it.
Or maybe we just fucked up. If you exit the tutorial via pause menu you can get to the main screen, so we experimented with play -> crime.net online and -> crime-net local wifi or whatever, and neither of us showed up as hosting a game when we did. Plus, the tutorial missions would flash angrily at us. We also managed to find a hosting interface that requires money which you probably earn at the end of the tutorial or something, but that seems like crap design for CoOp since you could possibly run out of "multiplayer monies" that way, forcing you to grind in singleplayer. Anyway, that's not the kinda thing you want to be fiddling with, beer in hand after and during a heart to heart with a good buddy.
In the end we just shelved that and played some Mario Kart (I suuuuck) and Splatoon (we suuuuuck) and ARMS (just enough suckage detected to be enjoyable, but bad fit for these casual non-sober situations).
Slightly smug "I told ya so" Corporal then grabbed Mercenary Kings to play on the big screen after we got home because I thought it'd be Metal Slug like, and such a game should be pretty fun when you're already in IDGAF mode... We already had a few "frustration beers" in, so dunno whether the following was my fault or not, and we were decidedly NOT in the mood to experiment or invest much effort after the previous blunder so whateverthefuck.
That game seems to support one-Switch CoOp via a four-way screen split. ONLY via four-way splitscreen.
Like, WHAT. You can't see shit on friendo's modest-sized TV. What kinda Metal Slug game would force you to play in 640x480 in a separate stamp-sized corner of a screen? It's probably for teh lootz with stats and inventory management, but there's gotta be better approaches for that.
In the end, a family emergency had his wife run off (to deal with that) and relegated us to babysit his little spawn. So, CoOp weekend went bust. I somewhat blame the devs of the above games for that too.
It's a cute kid though, and I hadn't played with DUPLO
TM or read and re-enacted a book to a spellbound audience before, so that was fun in its own way. Still, what a waste of a perfectly good 60-ish bucks.
