For me I just found it annoying that whenever we wanted to go in different directions one player would end up getting dragged back by the camera border. So many failed jumps…
But that’s fair, if someone thinks that being able to get in the way of each other and being forced to cooperate better due to it adds to their enjoyment of the game then playing the games without split screen could be preferable.
I just never considered that possibility.
Lego games like Lego Starwars has already been mentioned and I will second those (especially the newer ones that have split screen).
Divinity Original Sin is also great.
Honestly most games I can think of have already been mentioned and those who have not seem like they might not be that great of an option since it seems your partner isn’t normally into gaming. (RTS in particular might be too hard)
But I will suggest some anyway just in case
Starcraft 2 has free online multiplayer which includes a COOP vs AI mode.
There’s also a 2 player campaign adaption of Warcraft 3’s normally single player campaign. Although it might only be available for pre-Reforged.
Also I didn’t know about it before now, I googled it just in case, but apparently SC2 also has COOP mods for its campaigns.
You mentioned having a Switch so I will recommend Advance Wars Reboot and Wargroove 1 & 2, although there are no COOP campaigns but you can play multiplayer maps.
Besides Advance Wars Reboot Camp on Switch (or the originals for Gameboy, which you could play with emulator), there’s also an online fan site called Advance Wars By Web where you can play advance wars in the web browser, although there’s no single player.
Wargroove is also on Steam and besides the campaign and regular game itself there are puzzles.
And speaking of Puzzles, card games tend to have Puzzles. I haven’t actually played Magic, Yu Gi Oh, etc. so I can’t say for sure whether they have any, but there’s puzzles in Faeria. (I would’ve recommended Might and Magic Duel of Champions, it had some great puzzles, but Ubisoft shut that game down many years ago)
I second the Lego games. Although the older ones (Complete Saga) & Lego Indiana Jones were annoying to play COOP because there’s no split screen.
But Lego Star Wars Clonewars has split screen so you don’t get in the way of each other. I haven’t actually played other newer Lego games but I assume they will have split screen as well.
Been a while since I had a VM but iirc it was pretty easy to have a shared directory to the VM, which is very useful to (obviously) share files but it also means that since the files aren’t actually on the VM itself they’ll still be there even if you remove the VM since they’re not part of the image.
How I learned my lesson to have a shared directory was this: I had been having audio issues on the VM and at one point just decided to start over with a new VM, completely forgetting that the files I had been working on for a project were part of the VM and would be gone.
Just the other day I was looking into how to use a single shared WINE prefix for multiple users since it’s not like any 2 users would ever use the same PC at the same time… TIL I was wrong
Unfortunately I don’t really have anything helpful to add except it seems like Linux is more or less inherently built to support what you’re looking for.
Warcraft 3, Age Series (AoE, AoE2, AoM, AoE3), Need For Speed Most Wanted (2005)
I played the first age of empires when I was 6 or 7 y/o and I’ve played all of the games besides AoE4 (including Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds).
As a kid we had few crappy dell computers connected to just a hub (LAN without internet) and would play a lot of Age of Empires 2 and C&C Red Alert 1 & 2 multiplayer.
Age of Empires and Red Alert were also games I would frequently play at small LAN parties (although everyone was really bad)
I played a bit of online AoE2 when AoE2 HD came out on steam but it was pretty bad so I stopped playing it. When DE came out I started watching AoE2 content but I’ll never play it because I’ve come to greatly dislike Microsoft over the years.
I’ve replayed Need for Speed Most Wanted (and also Carbon) tens of times over the years, and I still play it every now and then (with mods now)
But the game I’ve played the most is probably Warcraft 3. I’ve played a ton of custom games on Battle.net (RIP) and it’s what got me a bit into programming since I liked making custom maps and making triggers eventually led me to learn JASS (Just Another Scripting Language)
If Blizzard didn’t completely ruin Warcraft 3 with WC3 Reforged Refunded I’d probably still be playing it and making custom maps every so often.
I have played a bit on private servers but it’s just not the same anymore.
There’s a pretty cool Warcraft 3 open source project called Warsmash though so maybe one day I’ll start playing again.
How you worded this makes it seem like “if those games didn’t” refers to requiring subscriptions.
I would suggest editing it to “If those games didn’t appeal to kids” or similar; if what you meant was that kids just plays what appeals to them, and those games “just happens” to be subscription games.
Arch Linux with i3wm
Fish, Alacritty, Rofi (dmenu replacement)
I first tried KDE Plasma 5 but tbh I thought it was just a worse experience than Win7, it was really close but all the tiny little annoyances got in the way and it felt like I couldn’t do everything I needed through GUI so I still had to use terminal but it was awkward having to switch between using the keyboard and mouse and I would navigate through the GUI to get to directories then open terminal…
After a month or two of that I finally tried a tiling WM (i3wm) and it’s just a way way better user experience than any DE.
I will note though that I’m using Fish for my interactive shell and seeing anything in the tiny dmenu was just way too hard until I used Rofi for drun.
Without Fish and Rofi I might’ve tried more DEs or even gone back to Win7.
I recently used Linux Mint with Cinnamon on a relative’s PC and using Bash and the apt package manager sucks so bad. I even prefer Arch KDE, although I think Nemo is a bit better than Dolphin.
Anyway it’s been about 2 years of daily driving Arch with i3wm for me and I haven’t really gone out of my way to learn things but you naturally pick stuff up along the way just by using it.
Just make sure you’ve got another device with an internet connection in case something happens. I basically haven’t had any issues after I got better but I made a lot of user errors at the start. Nothing that can’t be fixed but finding out how to do the fixing without internet is a million times harder.
Advance Wars By Web
Well, not sure if it counts, since it’s an online pvp fansite based on Advance Wars 1~2 and Dual Strike, but I’ve been playing it at least a few times every week for a while now.
As a kid I had windows 98 (and later xp) dual booted with debian and at some point some version of suse. This was ~20 years ago
Well I used it just fine and I knew a bout the mysterious “root” and “sudo” that my dad would use but I was just playing some games and maybe using the web browser.
Using the GUI I never learned Linux and it wasn’t until a few years ago that I started using Linux again, and it was only because I wouldn’t be able to continue using Windows 7 anymore.
So I don’t have any experience with teaching Linux and especially not to kids, but I think kids are actually really good at learning stuff if they need too, so give them a PC and the tools to figure things out, if they want to use it they’ve got to learn, and don’t give them other options where they don’t have to learn anything.
Finally someone that mentions an Enable Right Click extension. There’s a few out there but I use “Absolute Enable Right Click & Copy” as well.
On top of return youtube dislike & sponsorblock I will highly recommend BlockTube, it optionally removes shorts, the video pause and & popup asking if you’re still there, and a few other things. I’ve tried the “remove youtube loudness normalization” option but volume is just all over the place no matter what.
Of course these are specific to youtube and not essential for anyone who uses an alternative
To be honest I don’t remember the last time I finished a game.
Not counting Rogue-lite games where you replay them over and over like Slay the Spire I think the most “recent” game that I’ve finished might be Mass Effect 3, which is from 2012…
Oh actually I did finish The Banner Saga 1 a few years ago. It’s pretty good except for being somewhat lacking in Quality of Life features. The main selling point are the art style and gameplay-story integration. The tactical combat gameplay is okay but very repetitive, although it got a lot better in BS2 (which I haven’t finished) with more varied mission objectives than just “kill every enemy” over and over again.
Skyrim and Xcom 2 are probably in my top 3 or at least top 5 most played games but I have never completed them.
The games I’ve replayed and finished the most times are Dragon Age Origins and Mass Effect 1&2 (only completed ME3 2 times).
I’ve replayed DA:O more than 10 times and I would highly recommend it, although I would recommend getting mods and especially get the increased memory patch so it doesn’t crash as often.
Removing the awful camera zoom and graphics around the border when using Witcher Sense
If Mass Effect Legendary Edition actually included ME3’s multiplayer I might’ve considered installing Origin again.
TWP is even better than just google translate because it lets you choose between Google, Bing, Yandex, and DeepL translations, if a translation looks sus you can take a look at what the other translation engines say.
At least on PC
I used to have to wait 5~10 minutes on the loading screens before missions before when I didn’t have an SSD and only 8gb RAM
Warcraft 3 (RIP)
Skyrim
Xcom 2
Honorable mentions: Heroes of Newerth (RIP), Starcraft 2, Mass Effect trilogy & Dragon Age series
TIL
I didn’t have it set to true but I also never noticed any problem