G-pinions

You wanna play one of the best multi-player games ever made? Get R.A.D. Robot Alchemic Drive. I played the demo a year or two ago, loved it, and have yearned for more ever since. I finally picked it up recently, and popped it in last night to try out the 2-player mode. Soooooo much fun. For those unfamiliar with the game, it's basically a giant robot fighting game, seen and controlled from the perspective of your tiny character on the ground. The battles play out somewhat like Godzilla movies, with buildings getting smashed left and right, and people being stepped on (usually your character, accidentally). The coolest thing about the fights is that all the details cater to making it as "realistic" as possible. The characters move with the weight and awkwardness that real giant robots usually display, very mechanically and rigidly.

Controls are amazing, and really make it feel like you're commanding these massive steel beasts. L1 and R1 control your left and right legs respectively, so you need to move them alternately to walk. L2 and R2 makes you take steps back instead of forwards, and holding L1+L2 or R1+R2 makes you turn your body either left or right. You can hold L2+R2 to duck, and press L1+R1 while doing so for a huge robot jump if you're so inclined. Some robots can turn into planes or tanks, but still function similarly. Combat isn't all that dissimilar from Fight Night (the truth comes out about where EA got their control scheme from!), with each analog stick controlling an enormous metal arm. You can throw hooks, jabs and uppercuts easily by swiveling the sticks in specific ways, you can push them towards each other to block, and away from each other to, uh, start the Macarena. Several weapons (usually of the blaster variety) are mapped to the face buttons as well, so as you can see, you have plenty of combat options.

Now for the most beautiful part of this game - the view in which you play from. As I said, you see everything from your character's (regular-sized human) perspective, whether that means standing at your robots foot, standing on his shoulder, or standing on a nearby building (you can fly for short distances, which makes getting to those places easier - you are Japanese, after all). You have to find a balance between getting a clear view of the fight and staying out of danger, and often switch control back and forth from your mech to your human to make sure things stay that way. You'd think that this whole dynamic would be a massive bitch, but I can't imagine playing the game any other way; controlling your robot directly from a normal third-person view would just be boring. The great sense of scale and the intelligence of the controls both stand out a lot because of how you're viewing the action, and I wouldn't want it any other way.

I know I started this by saying it was a great multiplayer game and then started talking about the specific game mechanics, but they really do go hand in hand. Multiplayer is basically you and a pal trying to kill each other's robot or human, whatever dies first (I almost forgot, the humans have a projectile attack), in various locales around the world. And let me tell you, there's nothing quite like uppercutting someone's giant robot backwards through the Coliseum in Rome. The single player game has all the same great details, but is constantly interrupted by the most hilariously badly voice-acted/translated cutscenes you've ever heard. I'm only one level in, and it's still a lot of fun, but the multiplayer mode is where it's at. So seek it out, or better yet, come over and play my copy, because you probably won't find one yourself. Oh, here's a video, so you can see if it's anything like you imagined from my description.