Here lies splitscreen.

It’s no secret that local splitscreen gaming is a dying concept. This decline is no doubt contributing to the overall deterioration of multiplayer in general, although some don’t like to admit it. It seems that with this HD boom, companies are simply too anal about the graphics of their games for them to be compromised to the effect that the quality is reduced four-fold in incorporating four separate screen divisions. You’ll find this mostly in console-exclusive games, as it is in the best interests of the first-party companies for their console’s graphical capabilities to be showcased in full, so splitscreen is usually dropped in favour of online or system-link play. Now I don’t know about you, but I believe there is no way to replace the magic of having a friend, relative or rival sat on your bed, competing or co-operating with you. No Bluetooth headset can provide the hilarity of your partner-in-game’s involuntary facial expressions and bodily twitches as they tackle large challenges, and the commentary shared that leads to in-jokes brought up for weeks and even years to come. I still have many of my own, formulated in the golden age of Crash Bandicoot, Donkey Kong and Mortal Kombat that never would’ve come about were online multiplayer commonplace at the time. Even recently, I had a split-screen “no-scope” session on COD 6 (which is ironically one of the main franchises to blame for this), during which I laughed more than I had in a very long time. It is arguably because of the online success of games like Call Of Duty and Halo that lengthy story modes and splitscreen multiplayer has gone under such considerable decline, which is ironic, considering these games are 2 of the few modern franchises that still contain splitscreen. This is a real shame, as not all of my friends share my choice of console, so there is no way for us to play the majority of my games together, other than turn rotation. This is where I must also commend Capcom very highly, as they have really stuck to their guns in keeping local multiplayer present in pretty much all of their recent releases; an excellent example being Resident Evil (Biohazard) 5, which was actually an innovation in splitscreen in the way it divides the screen so as not to draw attention to each other’s division. As it remains one of the best looking games ever due to Capcom’s stunning optimisation skills (if only they could apply the same amount of coding prowess into their AI programming), the game was criticised by other developers for implementing splitscreen which slightly detracted from the beauty of the game. Yet Capcom didn’t give into this; they seem to hold gameplay as a higher priority than graphics, which says a lot about the gameplay considering their games have absolutely stellar visuals. Now I'm not saying I'm totally opposed to online play. Being one of the only decent Street Fighter players in my constituency, I am often found playing SSFIV online with no issues whatsoever, aside from ocassional lag. I've also had a great time and made some good friends online on Resident Evil 5, including the northener 'Strike-Team' (with random letters substituted for the 1337 equivelant) who had to leave the session for about 15 minutes as his cat Hovis had run out of the house, leaving me to cover his inactive Sheva for that amount of time because you can't pause online. That's the sort of situation where the magic of local multiplayer does carry over to online play, which is not uncommon if you know where to look. My real issue is how people manage find so much fun in 11 year old prepubescant outcasts telling you to "Cover my left flank" as though we were fighting in an actual war.