Stiq Figures, February 10 - 16: Co-op gone wrong edition
Welcome to Stiq Figures, where the sales data is after the break and the posts don't matter.
Cooperative gaming is conceptually brilliant and even better in execution. When it works, that is. Finding teammates you mesh with can feel a bit like flipping a coin - the pal you get along with elsewhere in life can turn out to be a more menacing threat to your in-game survival than any virtual antagonist. It's tough to know who's going to work as a sidekick until a few botched rounds definitively prove that they won't.
That was my experience with The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures. After being sold on the GBA-as-a-controller concept by Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles years before, I put together plans to find enough GBAs and cables to support a four-person adventure with a new group of friends.
We joked around on a daily basis as friends do, sure, but it took all of 10 minutes for Four Swords to bring out the absolute worst in us. Work together to save maidens? More like endless cycles of passive-aggressive behavior and revenge for "stolen" Force Gems, "miscalculated" bomb detonations and "accidental" lobs of teammates into pitch-black chasms. Alliances formed and shattered within minutes. If we ever reached a state of peace, the voting process to judge teammates at the end of each stage immediately stirred everything back up.
To this day, it's probably the worst I've ever behaved in a cooperative setting. I've witnessed more decency in games of Mario Party compared to the behavior we collectively displayed in Four Swords. Hopefully I'm not the only awful teammate out there - do you have any cooperative games that inspire your most shameful translation of teamwork? Or is it typically your "teammate" that goes rogue and causes everyone's abrupt death? Tell me about it in the comments, right after you check out this week's Japanese hardware sales after the break!
3DS LL: 27,650 [DOWN] 8,656
Vita: 17,081 [UP] 130
3DS: 12,066 [UP] 64
PS3: 10,226 [DOWN] 14
Wii U: 8,782 [UP] 1,602
PSP: 2,944 [DOWN] 4
Vita TV: 1,267 [DOWN] 64
Xbox 360: 256 [UP] 62
[Image: Nintendo]
