The Good – Always Having a Co-op Buddy
Throughout all of these memories so far, I have mentioned many different friends in the process, whether I named them or not. Most of those also occurred during my middle school or early high school years, and there’s a good reason for that.
A lot of my friends moved during or just before those years. Many got into drugs and other things and seemingly fell off the face of the map. With others, we just grew apart from each other or we just simply aren’t as close anymore. There has been one friend who I am as close as I always was with, B.J., whom I mentioned in the entries with The Sims and Gauntlet Legends.
He has always been one of my best friends throughout life, but he wasn’t much into video games when we were younger. It wasn’t until middle school that we started playing them a lot together. He wasn’t someone who wanted to play against me because it would result in him losing most of the time, and I wasn’t the person who really knew how to go easy on someone without being obvious about it. We pretty much exclusively played co-op from that point forward.
It began with Mario Kart: DD where we would play as Wario and Waluigi to have a monopoly on the Bob-omb market. This marked the beginning of me being the official driver and him being the official gunner for applicable games. We didn’t really play a lot of other Gamecube games other than that together. Not many with co-op were to his or my liking and some like 007: Everything or Nothing had co-op that we simply failed at every single time.
We shifted to Xbox once I got that during my freshman year of high school. Even though I had fewer options for us to play than for the Gamecube, what we had available was far better for what we were looking for. Halo: CE’s campaign, Halo 2’s campaign and online, Madden and other football games, and Star Wars Battlefront I + II were games that we spent dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of hours into working as a team.
The time we spent doing this ramped up once more of my friends were moving or growing apart from me. I enjoy being around people and not be a recluse, so this really meant a lot to me to have a friend that was always there to spend time with me when it seemed that a lot of people were starting to leave my life.
When we graduated high school, I got a 360 as my graduation gift from my parents, as well as Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. He decided to attend college locally while I went to one a couple of hours away, so we spent a lot of time together over the summer just to play them, as well as Mario Kart Wii online. Halo 3 offered co-op campaign and online while Modern Warfare offered nothing of the sort. Though he wasn’t a fan of facing me in a video game, we decided to make things interesting by having prone knife fights on Shipment or grenade launcher-only matches on any map.
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