Whatever happened to local co-op?

Lately, I've been noticing a disturbing trend in video games: no local cooperative play. This is something that, as far as I know, started with 2007's much-anticipated Crackdown for the XBox 360. My best friend Sean and I went out and bought this game hoping to take it right back to my house and crank out some destructive, city-leveling, rocket-launcher-to-each-other's-faces co-op.

And what did we see when we turned on the game? Well, at least on my tiny non-HD clunk of a high school TV, the first thing that caught our eyes was the gorgeous panning city in the background. Unfortunately, this just got our hopes up even more for the beautiful explosions that awaited us. After we'd wiped the tears from our glossy eyes, we looked at the actual menu. But something was missing. Where was multiplayer? There was Campaign. There was XBox Live. But no multiplayer option.

I immediately scurried over to the box (which I had casually tossed on my dirty laundry) and looked at the back. Sure enough, the little white box with the green font (which indicates no internet required) stated in heartbreaking lower-case letters: players 1. And while my brain scrambled frantically to process this data, the little orange letters underneath the green laughed at me: online co-op 2.

This was my first experience with this disgusting caprice, and I wish I could say it was my last. Unfortunately, however, local co-op is something that many game companies have decided isn't worth putting in their games anymore. In fact, shooters seem to be the only games that feature local co-op anymore. The Halo series, Left 4 Dead 1&2, and Resident Evil 5 come to mind. But where are my offline Red Dead Redemptions, my local Team Fortress 2s? It seems that local multiplayer is only included in so-called party games these days, i.e. games you play with a big group of people, like New Super Mario Bros. Wii or Rock Band. Games with a dedicated story rarely have co-op at all, let alone local play.

This is something that game developers need to consider more often. Not everyone has every system, and it would be nice to be able to have friends over to play through a good session of Crackdown, if only to shoot each other in the back every five minutes.