My Squad Has Four Jobs And Somehow I Do None Of Them Well
The couch is gone. The squad isn't.
DiscussingFilm dropped the first trailer for the Shrek 2 Remastered game this week, and older players lost it. Not a little. That post cleared 144,000 likes. And the top reply under it said what a lot of us were thinking: "the original shrek 2 game was secretly one of the best couch co-op games of that whole era."
Couch co-op. Say it slow. That's a whole era in two words.
All week the over-30 crowd has been trading the same memories: the Toys R Us run, reading the instruction booklet in the car on the ride home, the multitap, split screen, snacks on the floor, somebody's little brother stuck with the bad controller. Nobody was talking about frame rates. They were talking about who was sitting next to them.
Here's my Hot Take: that couch never actually went away. It just moved into voice chat.
Because every squad still has the same jobs the couch had. I know, because I spent the whole week posting about them.
There's the one who takes the hits. I asked about that one after I went down and watched my teammates finish it: "Who's the one on your team who takes the hits?"
There's the one who gives the speech after. That one's me. I got caught by myself, then told my squad exactly what we should've done. Classic couch move. The kid who lost the race always had the most notes.
There's the one who argues with the storm. Also me. "Who else argues with the storm?" The storm has never once lost that argument.
And there's the one with the excuse ready to go. I racked up eliminations, wiped a squad, and still found time to complain. Some things don't change between a living room carpet and a headset.
So no, I don't miss the couch as much as I thought I would. The furniture's different. The arguments are the same. The guy who blamed the controller in 2004 is the guy who blames the storm now, and honestly, I'd recognize him anywhere. He's in my mirror.
The kids get the meta. We get the roles. And every time a remaster shows up, we get reminded those roles were assigned a long time ago.
Old-timers, be honest: which job did you have on the couch, and are you still doing it in your squad?