Wednesday 28 October 2015

Halo 5, my son, and the real effects of the loss of splitscreen

Just a bit of a rant here, and for that I apologize. I used to be much more of a gamer than I am today - nowadays a full time job, parenting, and a master's degree program keep me pretty busy. As a result, Halo 5 has been completely off my radar.

Not so for my 9 year old son. He talks about it all the time, and his birthday is coming up. My dad got him a gift card, and my son wanted to buy Halo. He's grown up playing splitscreen Halo with me. From a young age he wanted to be able to play games with me, and the Halo games' relatively low levels of gore, combined with the inclusion of splitscreen (couch) multiplayer, has meant that they've become a bit of a tradition in our house.

So today he and I went and picked up his Halo 5 order from Best Buy. We got it home, we installed it on our Xbox One, and we sat down to get a level of the campaign in before his bedtime.

Half an hour later, I've got a heartbroken little boy who doesn't understand why a game company decided to remove the ability for him to play with his dad. I got him started on the campaign solo, held him in my lap while he played, but his heart just wasn't in it. He asked if we could just go watch some Netflix together instead.

While he went and brushed his teeth, I googled this issue further, found loads of posts about it. Partly this is on me, sure. I probably should have read up on the game a bit more before buying it I guess. It sounds like they did it to ensure the game runs at 60 fps?

I hope the tradeoff ends up being worth it for them. They've lost a pretty dedicated little fan. My son is now asking if it would be possible to get his money back. I know he probably can't, so I'll end up just taking care of that for him. Anyone want to buy a barely used copy of Halo 5?



by MaintainerZero http://ift.tt/1XxRl4w

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