Editor's note: I feel Alex's pain. My friend and I are always on the lookout for local multiplayer games on 360 and PS3, but we usually end up falling back on the Wii or passing the controller. Do you find yourself in similar situations? Or are you happy playing online? -Brett

Hanging out at a friend's house the other week, we decided to fire up his PlayStation 3 and check out Fat Princess. He played some, I played some. We soon realized that one of us watching the other one play online got boring fast. So I asked if he had a second controller to play a game together. He pulled out another Sixaxis and started digging through the Fat Princess menus.

"Oh, I guess this doesn't have any local multiplayer," he said.

"Ugh, crap. Well, do you have a game that does?" I responded.

"Hmmm, Motorstorm does, I think."

This excited me. I had been wanting to try out Motorstorm since playing the demo at Best Buy. Sadly, we quickly discovered that it also didn't have any local multiplayer.

Out of options, we resigned ourselves to passing the controller with Battlefield 1943 and Fat Princess.

Now, I won't defend everything about the Wii, but it seems to me Nintendo has gotten one thing right that Microsoft and Sony have forgotten: local multiplayer.

I love having the Wii for when people come over. Whether it's the family coming over for the holidays, a friend stopping by, or my sister-in-law's transatlantic boyfriend staying in town, the Wii gets a lot of play. We waggle away on the couch, make fools of ourselves, and generally have a great time together.

With the popularity of online play on the PS3 and 360, are we slowly losing this element of social gaming interaction? In 10 years, will it be completely impossible to sit down with a group of friends for some game time?

Every time we have a family gathering with my wife's side of the family, I inevitably end up back at her cousin's house. There, her uncle, a couple of her cousins, their friends, and I play Halo, Call of Duty, or some other shooter for hours.

I'm terrible at first-person shooters, but it's still a lot of fun to get together with everyone and play because we're all generally at the same skill level. If I had to play online with strangers, I'm sure I would get completely destroyed -- and that's why I don't see myself buying any shooters when I get a PS3 or 360. That heady rush of laughing and cursing together on the same couch would be gone.

Obviously online has its benefits -- I don't think we should get rid of it. But I do wish that the industry would stop forgetting about local multiplayer.

When my kids are old enough to play games with me, I want to be able to sit down and have trash talking matches with them. Is it going to come to the point that we will have to have two systems to play online while we're sitting right next to each other?

I hope not.

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