This reminds me of a lesser known and underrated game on the GameCube, Pac-Man Vs. (designed by Miyamoto). [1]

It worked by having one player use a GameBoy Advance (connected to the GameCube with an adapter) to (privately) operate Pac-Man while the other three players use GameCube controllers to operate ghosts from the TV.

Additionally, to give Pac-Man a better shot at winning, the three ghosts play from a third-person 3D perspective, rather than top-down.

The ghost that caught Pac-Man would get to take over as Pac-Man (which would inevitably result in a tangled mess of cords by the end).

It was a great couch 3v1 game.

The WiiU had similar mini-games in Nintendo Land [2], with one player operating the Wii U gamepad, while the others played from the TV.

I miss the era of couch multiplayer games.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_Vs%2E

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Land

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jrm4 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Funny how perhaps "localized" this might be? Grew up an only child but now I have 2 kids, and "couch multiplayer" is now perhaps the majority of my game time.

This is where Steam shines;e.g. Speedrunners, Boomerang Fu, and the very deceptively deep Bopl Battle. Co-op too. Not a huge fan of the cooking games, but Bish Bash Bots is a fantastic co-op tower defense game.

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wffurr an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

That era is not over. My kids and their friends and us parents play a lot of couch Nintendo games on the Switch. Mario Kart, Mario Party, Overcooked, Lego Party, Super Smash Bros. There's a multiplayer mode in Super Mario World 3D and Super Mario: Wonder.

It's only two player but my older son and I are working on Lego Voyagers. I'd like to play It Takes Two and Split Fiction with my spouse.

I do like the idea of the asymmetric multiplayer games but I am not aware of any that work with the Switch. They might be out there though.

	▲	jader201 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It may not be completely over, but it’s far from the focus of multiplayer gaming. Many games that used to offer couch multiplayer (e.g. split screen) options no longer do. The upcoming Starfox remake is a great example (no split-screen multiplayer options, where the original did). I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a 4-player split-screen FPS (like Goldeneye 007). Can you find games that offer couch multiplayer? Sure. But it’s not something that is a priority, particularly for most mainstream games. (And as a side note, LAN parties are also largely a thing of the past.)