Destructoid Changelog: Long live co-op, and Los Santos!

Hello everyone, and welcome to the latest issue of Destructoid Changelog. This week, we’re reminiscing about the magic of co-op in honor of Split Fiction and Monster Hunter Worlds, as well as revisiting Los Santos.

Long live co-op!

As with many of the games media over the last week, we’ve been playing an awful lot of Split Fiction.

The follow-up to It Takes Two, A Way Out, and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is another co-op smash from Hazelight Studios, thrusting players into the team’s most ambitious and imaginative series of gameplay styles yet.

Between that and last week’s launch of Monster Hunter Wilds, co-op gaming is making a comeback, especially when factoring in Helldivers 2 last year – and we couldn’t be happier.

Not long ago, we saw games shoehorning in PvP wherever they could with tacked-on modes that ranged from the superlative (The Last of Us’ factions mode) to the pointless. And, while Monster Hunter has always leaned on cooperation, the SOS flare and Wilds’ more beginner-friendly nature mean we’ve been coming to the aid of newbies all week long to help them complete quests.

It’s delightful, although not quite as chaotic as calling in a buddy in Helldivers 2 and seeing them land on a squadmate’s head like a heavily armored Mario squashing a Koopa.

Then there’s Split Fiction, which deserves all of the praise it’s getting for the way it constantly delights and surprises, almost Nintendo-like in its ability to put a smile on your face. And, while we’re sure it’s great online, this writer played the entire thing through with a loved one and felt like our bond was stronger by the end somehow.

All of the above are a testament to the ways video games can connect us, and in an increasingly divided world, we’re grateful for those co-op sessions.

Editor’s Corner - Bitmap Bliss

All this talk of cooperative play has sent me spinning back to the 90s, when my friends and I would cram around my Amiga 500 to play the best cooperative title of the era, the mighty Chaos Engine by The Bitmap Brothers.

This game would drag us into a strange world of steampunk, Victorian stylings, and violence as you teamed up with a friend to take on the hoards that were foolish enough to place themselves between you and the end credits.

At the time, it was a regular occurrence for games to have much deeper lore than they had any real chance of conveying in the game, and The Chaos Engine was no different. A time traveling scout gets trapped in 1800s England, and the Royal Society somehow ends up getting their mitts on his equipment.

Baron Fortesque, roughly based on Charles Babbage, manages to jump start computer science with a serious cheat sheet, and instead of a difference engine, we end up in an alternative timeline with the titular chaos engine instead. The computer developers a mind of its own, takes over society and proceeds to build any number of robots to dispense some rough justice to anyone it deems to have stepped out of line.

Anyone who is able to runs for the boats, and the British Royal Family, Parliament, and many more manage to make it out before the country is completely locked down. It gave us everything we wanted and more, as our mercenary characters braved the terrible odds to cash in for the price that had been placed on the simulated sentience’s head.

It was a fun period in gaming, where it genuinely felt like the British scene was going to rule how gaming developed for a very long time. On top of the The Bitmap Brothers, we also got to enjoy games from the likes of Rockstar, DMA Design, Sensible Software, Bullfrog, Team17, Psygnosis, Codemasters, the incredible Chris Sawyer, and so many more.

-Aidan (Destructoid Interim-EIC)

Alright, that’s it - back to Los Santos!

We’re not sure if you heard, but there’s a little game called GTA 6 launching this year. It marks the first in the franchise since 2013’s GTA 5 (has it really been that long?), but PC players have got the short end of the stick with the latest game only coming to current-gen consoles at this point in time.

If you do happen to be a PC gamer (and there are dozens of us!), you may have felt a little more smug this week as GTA 5 Enhanced Edition finally launched on PC. Yes, it took considerably longer than the console updates, but it really does look much, much better.

Packing all the Enhanced Edition goodies from PS5 and Xbox Series X/S into a free update was a nice surprise, but adding additional graphics settings for some genuinely impressive ray-traced lighting effects is the cherry on top of a crime boss’ birthday cake.

We admit it took way too long, but if you’ve not visited Los Santos in a while, we can wholeheartedly recommend it.

That’s all for today, but we’ll be back next week. Thanks for subscribing!

Destructoid team