Single player team efforts

[ubersaurus]

Zillion is compared to Metroid much of the time as one of those games that's a great single player experience-making the map, finding your way through the base, collecting power ups and ultimately running like hell when the place is about to blow.

However, I rarely see anything about people playing through Zillion as a group. The game lends itself extremely well to that-assuming someone has printed out a map, you've got 1 or 2 navigators, someone to keep track of the special codes, someone to hit Pause to switch characters, the player themself, and the entire room to remember the door codes for each room.

This makes Zillion one of the most entertaining party games I've ever bore witness to. A room full of people, yelling and trying to work together to blow the Norsa to hell, and all the shouting and panicking when the bomb is set and escape is necessary, it's a very rich way to play the game.

I know there are other games like this. Silent Hill comes to mind, and probably Impossible Mission as well. Anyone else have similar experiences of a group effort to finish a single player game?

[Kroogah]

Last January, party at Chunky's house. Darth Vader, dave2236, and Perkar (with some minor assistance from me, Oobgarm, Chunky, and portnoyd) beat all 16 levels of the classic mode on Qix Neo. That shit was epic.

[Pantechnicon]

Way back in my Marine Corps days (1990) I was pulling weekend duty once. A couple of the other guys decided to rent an NES and Crystalis. There were about five of us involved in a 48-hour marathon with that thing while alternating gameplay with eating, sleeping and guard duty. At the end we sent a group photo of everyone standing in front of the end screen to Ninendo Power Magazine. That was pretty cool.

[SoulBlazer]

Hey, that sounds interesting. Did they publish the pic? If so, do you have a scan? And where were you and your friends at? Your commanding officers never asked what was going on?

[Pantechnicon]

Hey, that sounds interesting. Did they publish the pic? If so, do you have a scan? And where were you and your friends at? Your commanding officers never asked what was going on?

Pic never got published, so no scan . Maybe there were too many of us in the shot. This happened on the USS Canopus (AS-34) which, at the time, was home-ported in King's Bay, GA. As far as command was concerned there wasn't any sort of issue with it so long as nobody was playing while they were actually on duty (e.g. - taking a Game Boy to a guard post...may God help you).

It might seem like this was a lot of effort to put into the game but let me point out that this was 1990; before hint guides, before faqs, etc. Moreover no one involved in this effort had ever even played an RPG before, so this was really new territory. I think at one point we actually had to call the 1-900 hint line ($2 a minute) to get past one point in the game, but other than that the whole thing was done through a big group collaboration.

I should also point out that this was the game that convinced me, an old Atari 2600 die-hard, that maybe this NES thing wasn't so bad after all.

[pacmanhat]

My friends and I have done this with The Incredible Machine on 3DO. We've never managed to get past 30-35 puzzles, though...somewhere in there, there's one that just totally sucks ass.