[codingkoi]

My siblings and I would tape a monopoly board to the TV to split it vertically and then play team games to get around “screen cheating”. I think it had the best of both worlds. We were still in the same room but we could ambush and sneak up on each other. Definitely less expensive than this solution.

Goldeneye 64 was the best bang for our buck of any game we ever bought. We did the same thing with Perfect Dark.

[willismichael]

That's incredible. Somebody actually found a genuinely enjoyable use of a monopoly board.

[voidfunc]

I like Monopoly, but this made me laugh.

[shoo]

in a better world, every family would not have the traditional copy of monopoly on the shelf, but would instead have a copy of chinatown

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/47/chinatown

https://www.shutupandsitdown.com/videos/review-chinatown/

[RileyJames]

Yep, remember doing that once or twice in halo 1.

Ultimately, screen cheating is a feature.

Halo worked well as the pistol (starting weapon) is all you really need. So there’s no massive disadvantage on spawn.

I remember playing online 2v2 (halo on xbox, there was no online so it was actually system link, lan, run over the network. Bloody hard work from Australia) in which screen cheating is most definitely a feature.

Nothing more bonding for two brothers to duke it out 1v1, and then discover you’re leagues ahead of everyone online in 2v2.

[mulmen]

As I recall the Xbox had an Ethernet port and Halo supported up to four consoles. I think there were some limitations. Not sure if two teams of 8 were possible but I think 4x4 was. At a minimum I believe dedicated screens were possible in a four player game.

The PS2 had something similar (only two consoles) but it used Firewire because Sony is the Apple of Japan.

[dmead]

During undergrad in the US we used to use Xbox connect. It would function had a lan bridge to other people so you'd just use the regular halo UI to find a game.

So it has no real online features but they were grafed on by a bunch of tricks.

[megablast]

Screen cheating is a valid form of play though. You have to be good to know where someone is by quickly looking at their screen.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Yeah that's how my group of friends came to see it. It was just another skill we could compete with. Some of us could watch the other three screens most of the time and hardly look at our own, which led to strategies of running around while staring at floors and walls to mask our position better.

The game has a lot of tricks too as I recall. Grenade launcher grenades only explode when hitting the ground, not other surfaces, so if you know what you're doing you can kill someone half way across The Complex with one. Oh, and some guns can shoot through doors, but the door must be open(ing) for it to actually register the hit, otherwise it is just rendering a tracer. Stuff like that.

Perhaps someday I will have an opportunity to save the world with my license-to-kill, postols-only, Complex skills. Only then will my misspent youth make sense.

[noobermin]

18 year old me would say "only noobs think this"

[tenken]

Yup, it's simple, just get better at the game.

[udp]

We used to position the TV such that it was split between two bunks of a bunk bed. One player below and one player above.

[aunty_helen]

Perfect dark was such a great game. Heaps of innovative concepts.

Not sure screen cheating would work very well against the sniper that can shoot through walls though.

[donatj]

I remember having a good hiding spot near the ammo for the FarSight and just taking out my friends on repeat for like 20 solid minutes before they managed to get to me and kill me. Totally OP in wrong hands and amazingly fun.

One of my honest bigger complaints about newer first person shooters is that they round all that corners off the map. There's no good sniper nests.

In Halo Infinite anywhere you could reasonably snipe from is out of bounds. They give you a grappling hook, but don't let you go anywhere interesting with it in the multiplayer.

[fernandotakai]

the second mode on all weapons made perfect dark absurdly unique. the laptop gun was super fun and innovative.

[14]

I was going to mention Perfect Dark. Probably my favourite game to this day. So many good wasted childhood hours playing this game.

[stevesearer]

I loved Perfect Dark but never completed the game as my system would always freeze due to the number of explosions during the last level’s boss battle. Even with the expansion memory pack thing.

[Arrath]

I was an unashamed screen-looker in the Goldeneye days, and got no end to the raft of shit I got from my friends over it.

As luck would have it, those skills were a great advantage when playing games like Halo LAN parties where I was sharing the screen with my allies rather than enemies. A quick glance and I could gauge their location, situation, and how best to help them out.

[effingwewt]

We used cardboard boxes in a panels formed to a cross and extended. I don't know how we spent days playing it but we did!

We had some people who relied on screen cheating so much they refused to play with it.

It was weird how split the community was on screem cheating or not back then.