My top 10 multiplayer games

My family and friends love to play games together. Here is a list of games I have found and enjoy playing. It is not in order and not dedicated to a specific gaming platform.

1) World of Warcraft (PC)

Ok, a little background on this. For many years, we would only play games together that absolutely did not require any kind of payment. Period. I flat out refused. Then my friend brought his PC to my house with this game and was showing us how it worked and how much fun it was questing. Yeah, we were hooked. I set up my trial account which lasted a day before I realized I couldn't get mailed items

and ended up purchasing the game. That wasn't enough though. I didn't have the same version that he did so I had to upgrade to the Burning Crusade expansion. Now there is Wrath of the Lich King. This game, although pay-to-play at about $15/month, is so massive that when they take servers down for maintenance every tuesday, sometimes it takes them over 12 hours to finish. I can't even begin to imagine how many servers they have and how many people they have managing them. I hope for their sake they are running this all on vmware clusters, or the like.

So this fun *little* game is fun because I can play in groups with my friends, we help each other quest, fight in PVP together against the swarms of horde, or just waste the day away trying to accomplish all of the strange and mostly worthless achievements that came with the latest expansion.

The boring part is the grinding and farming. Grinding experience is where you go and kill a bunch of stuff and complete quests as fast as you can trying to get to that next level where you can get more fighting skills and train more profession skills. Farming is where you do the same thing but in order to raise your reputation with different factions (groups), gather green, blue and purple items (and orange sometimes), or to get certain materials or gold, or stuff to put on the auction house for the highest bidder.

Some people just socialize, dancing on the fountains in the cities, or doing a line dance while making train noises in the auction house (they must be REALLY bored).

2) Scorched Earth 3D (PC)

For those of us that have used the old IBM clones or early DOS based PCs, we know that this comes out of an archaic cult classic game where a gorilla tosses an exploding banana at another gorilla in a city. That was 2D.

Then there was Scorched Earth, the mother of all games. My roomate in college and I would play this after class, before class...when we weren't playing Warlords. In those days, not many people had a computer, or we would share one in our dorm. So, hotseat games became very popular. Many people would take a turn on one computer which would play out before the next person's turn. Then they added simultaneous mode where everyone would tell the computer what they wanted to do and it would do EVERYTHING at once. Wow, where'd my shot go? How'd you get your baby missle inside my heavy shield?

So what is the obvious progression from this wonderful game? Why, 3-dimensional warfare of course. New weapons, new environments and beautifully FREE! They made their project opensource and anyone can develop MODs for it (gaming environments, weapons, tanks) Any you can play with up to 24 people...holy crap. Some of the weapons you can buy take out half the map on their own when launched by 1 person. The graphics, sounds and gameplay are fantastic for a free game.

3) AdventureQuest (PC)

Ok, this game isn't truly multiplayer, although many sites look at it as such. It's a unique game that is kind of fun to play where you can buy unique weapons, armor (like ninja, mage, berserker) and spells, go on quests and the buy-in for lifetime gameplay as a Guardian is $25. My son and I enjoy this one.

4) Mario Kart (Wii)

This game is fun to play online, but it's a pain to connect with your friends. We gave up after a while since it took so long. However playing it in the house on the Wii and big screen is a real blast. Zoom around taking out the computer players or each other, battle to gather coins, or just race. You can set the teams, chose your ride and your famous Nintendo cartoon characters.

5) Halo (Xbox, Xbox 360)

This game has come far and is a cool series to play for people who enjoy a good frag like in the gold old days of computer games such as Duke Nukem and Rise of the Triad as well as the Quake and Doom games. You can fight against each other in multiplayer with grenades, highpowered guns and rocket launchers. Halo 2 ads the ability to use a one-handed weapon in the off-hand. Watch out for those needlers! You can also play in co-op mode where you help each other defeat the bad guys. Just don't run into your partners friendly fire...

6) Metal Arms (Xbox)

Glitch! You rusty bucket of bolts! This game is a blast to play. If you have kids, you can tell that the main general is swearing when he's giving Glitch his orders, but everything is always bleeped out. The weapons are so much fun, but where it really gets fun is using the robots that you can take control of or even get into and fight with! I enjoy grabbing myself a rivet gun and amassing an army of robots to follow me, which works well until someone makes them think I'm on the wrong side...

7) ExciteBots (Wii)

Online or split-screen, this game is so much fun to play. Playing as a animal/bug shaped robots, you drive on a course and score soccer goals, knock down bowling pins, smash your competition, chomp them in the butt and you soar so high into the sky you can't always see where you are going to end up.

8) MafiaWars (Text game on Facebook and many other social networking sites.)

A little bit of harmless fun where your mafia family battles against other mafia families. These families are merely friends you have invited to join you. With forums dedicated specifically for that purpose, it's fairly easy to get your mafia up to the 501 max allowed for you to fight with. However, the higher you go the more special items you can buy (1 for every 2 levels) and properties such as Mafia Mike's. You have jobs that you have to repeat in order to master a job tier before moving on to the next set of jobs. You have special loot that you collect and store in your vault for bonuses.

9) Texas Hold-em (Facebook, and many others)

I like playing this on Facebook because it's totally free, unless you choose to buy in with extra cash, but it's totally unnecessary. The graphics are wonderful and so is the gameplay. There are even drinks or gifts you can give to fellow players, which is nice to do when you have all of their money.

10) Perfect World (PC)

This is an anime based mmorpg similar to World of Warcraft but free with extra pay options. The first thing you notice when playing this game is that you can really jump far...and fall far without taking damage. The quests can be a little difficult to figure out at first but people are very helpful. The graphics and audio on this game are stunning and provide a very relaxing atmosphere.