I don’t think I am the first person to notice this, but I feel like the first to come out in anger against the new direction video game companies are taking “multiplayer” video games these days — if you can even still call them multiplayer.

The first offense I noticed was last year’s Left 4 Dead. My roommates and I rented a copy and were ready for some four-player, zombie, split-screen action on my 52-inch TV. We put the disc in my XBOX360 only to figure out that four player co-op really meant two player split-screen split between two different consoles. Thankfully one of my roommates had a 360 of his own so he had to go rent another copy and salvaged our plans for the evening.

Borderlands does this even worse. I had figured it would take the Left 4 Dead route as far as multiplayer online was concerned, so we got our hands on two copies. All that let us do was find out that if you want to play with three of your friends, you are going to need four copies of the game and four 360s. Really, Gearbox Studios? When did it seem like that would be the easiest way to make the game fun?

Call of Duty (any version of it) is guilty of this as well, but in a different way.  How disappointed were you the first time you opened your copy and tried to hop online with a friend only to find out that you can’t bring a guest from your XBOX online? Come on!

Halo had allowed this for years, and not just one friend, you could bring three with you. What made Activision think it was a good idea to make the most fun you can have with your friends and Call of Duty is 2v2?

Halo 3 seemed to be the last bastion of true console multiplayer. That is until ODST came out. Maybe I just assume too much but when it came out I was in love with Firefight mode, and I had figured I could have my friends over so we could play four people on a single 360 against the computer AI. Once again, we sat there in disappointment as we found out first hand that even Halo wont allow you to use the four controller spots on your 360 to their potential anymore.

There’s an obvious answer as to why game companies do this.

If you wan’t to play with your friends, they will have to have their own consoles and their own games. It’s very smart on their part; everyone loves money. But games have always been about fun. All this is doing is making it harder for gamers to get together to have a nice play session.

I want to play Firefight with three of my friends in the same room. I don’t want to have to make my friend go rent the game then drag his TV and his 360 over to my place. Unfortunately, it seems that if I ever want to play a recent or new multiplayer game with more than one person we are either going to have to drag our equipment around town or buy more copies of the game.

If that’s the case, we’ll end up playing at our separate houses and never see each other again.

It’s going to become a lot harder to break the “gamer’s have no social life” stereotype with this completely stupid and disappointing gaming trend.

Borderlands, Call of Duty, Halo, Left 4 Dead, Multiplayer, Video Games, XBOX