The Death of Couch Co-Op and Playing Games with my Wife

[Gaminggumper]

So this is going to be combination rant about the state of gaming in the "Online World", and an honest request for a little help in funding my solution for the issue at home. If neither of those topics interest you then, I understand and feel free to ignore the rest of the post.

First a bit of a backstory. I've been playing games since I was very little. This is fairly common now, but for someone that just turned 37 not the typical childhood. Thanks to my dads interest in early generation home computing (TI99-4A and Atari 800XE/1080XE). I've been a gamer on everything you can think of including the Nintendo (although that was for when I was at my friends place).

Any who. When I met and married my wife 16+ years ago, we quickly bonded over playing FFVII together. She would grind for gold and to level Materia (she loves to min/max game systems), and I would work through the story (I prefer the story/world exploration). Soon we got our first PS1 and played couch coop games like crazy.

This continued through the PS2/PS3 generations, and the Wii. However, with the new generation of consoles, we have now found that as much as we still enjoy many of the same games, the only way that we can actually play together is if we have two consoles/accounts. Game devs/publishers want to push the hardware graphically and so even though we have larger TV sets than ever the idea of sacrificing image quality over splitscreen co-op, something we really loved about Borderland series, is not worth the effort and cost.

They are a business so I don't really blame them for the current situation, but as I said the only way she and I can go back to our favorite pastime of playing games together is to purchase another PS4. We both love to play ElderScrollsOnline and Destiny, but are forced to carve out time for each of us to use the console, and can't enjoy these with each other.

OK so now to the second part I warned you about. The shameless Promo. I make a decent living, and so items like the PS4 aren't out of reach of my budget. We are still working toward coming up with the funds ourselves, but I though it wouldn't hurt to offer my gaming friend the opportunity to chip in if they were interested.

So to that end I've created a GoFundMe campaign (https://www.gofundme.com/trvw4br8) to help offset the expense. There is no fee to donate, and any donations will go straight to this purpose.

I know I've only been in the community for a few short months, but I come by at least daily to say Hi in the chat, and when possible stay online most days. I know how great kind and generous many of the community members are, especially in helping Cohh live his dream.

If anyone at all is interested in helping me with mine I would be most grateful and perhaps you could get a devoted friend out of the deal.

Either way, if you see me online on the PSN/Steam (Gaminggumper) feel free to through me a friend request for some multiplayer fun.

Thanks for your time,

Forrest (Gaminggumper)