Social Gaming: Doom 2

Normally, I use my Social Gaming section to show games I think are best played in groups.  Well, this time I want to talk about something that's better left to single-player campaigns.  In all fairness, it's probably a fine game in Deathmatch when done appropriately (some maps absolutely are not meant to be for multi), but since I give off a kind of fear aura with the people around me, we all went co-op.  What followed was a mashup of stupidity, and not in a good way.
There is a certain appeal to getting a bunch of people together for Doom.  This is a challenging game, so having 3 friends around to help plus the ability to respawn when you die sound sound like good things.  They are, but they carry significant drawbacks with them.  For one, the map becomes more challenging than would appear in single-player (for example, Cyberdemons appear in places where they otherwise would not exist).  The pickups remain unchanged, but end up being distributed among whoever happens to pick them up.  That means there's a lot less health and ammunition available for each player.  If those players should happen to die, most of that gets wasted.

It should be noted that I am not entirely in the best position to make this claim.  I am the only one who really likes Doom enough to purchase it and play through it myself.  As a result, I am generally the expert surrounded by inexperienced rookies (no offense intended to them).  Given the challenges added to multiplayer plus the challenges simply inherent to having 4 players, you really need everyone to be on the same skill level to have fun with it.  Of course, there's also the thing of everyone being really itchy on the trigger-fingers (myself included sometimes) and accidentally vaporizing a teammate.  You don't quite have to kill everything that moves, even if it feels that way sometimes.

There are good times to be had here though, so it's worth the money to get this downloaded on your Xbox 360.  This is one of the only console shooters I will play because you don't need to aim very precisely very quickly.  All you have to do is aim horizontally and the vertical will take care of itself.  This carries some problems (such as not aiming if the target is too far away or firing a missile at the floor because a pixel of an enemy happened to appear just before you shot), but I feel it delivers more good than bad.  The game also offers challenge to literally all levels of gamer, so I have a hard time seeing anyone who could not have fun with this if they enjoy shooters in general.  I even have some 2D shooter moments when I'm being barraged with fireballs and I have to maneuver around them.