2600! The Atari 2600! My, or I should say our (my brother was co-owner!) very first gaming system! I’m talking 1979 or so, and those games were literally 4 kilobytes of code! As a matter of fact “Combat” was only 2kB! An entire game with music, graphics and gameplay in a thousandth of the space a 2 minute MP3 would take up. Joust was my favorite…. two player! Oh my God we had lots of fun…..
Now fast forward to 2018 and my neighbor and I have been getting really deep into Rocket League. The premise is simple: 3 on 3 soccer, with rocket powered cars! You can ‘ride the walls’, you can fly… that is, once you learn how to control yourself. The depth of this game is mind-blowing. The level attained by the top guys is nothing short of amazing, and now that I’m 450 hours (?@?!?2!?2) in and Alberto has about half of that, we are getting our asses handed to us, STILL, on a pretty regular basis! Then again, we have learned a lot of technique and tricks: lunging by a well timed double tap, saving rocket boost for just the right time. It’s ALL about timing, flying, positioning…. a lot like chess: easy to learn, exceedingly hard to master, but always fun along the journey. Just let the term ‘air dribbling’ sink in for a second……
Unique and amazing: you can play cross-platform mulitplayer online! That means someone with an XBOX can play another with a Playstation and another with Steam on Windows. Equally cool is that on Windows you can connect controllers from both systems simultaneously! My neighbor has a PS4, I use an XBox One S model, in the same game split-screen.
For $19.99, and often on sale for half of that, this is simply one of the greatest games of all time. The physics engine is awesome, there are endless training sequences available, plenty of totally free multiplayer servers that work fast and smoothly, with plenty of players looking for games, competitive or not. There are even experimental modes, with weird tweaks like fists and lightning, and a bizarre “hoops” mode where getting the ball in the air is crucial; you catch my drift. Simply AWESOME!
