The first shooter game that I remember using dual analog sticks for was Red Faction on the PlayStation 2. I never did play it all the way through, but I knew the demo backwards and forwards. To me it was a big advancement of the Nintendo 64 joystick and C buttons, which I'd previously been accustomed to from playing hours upon hours of Turok 2: Seeds of Evil and Goldeneye.
When Red Faction II was released, I didn't have much of a choice but to buy it immediately. I was upset that it lacked online play (SOCOM: US Navy SEALs and Tribes: Aerial Assault were the hot, new online items for PlayStation, and Xbox Live had already launched), but being able to makeshift some co-op play against bots a la Unreal Tournament was the biggest selling point for me. That, and Geo Mod.
After playing through the campaign - which could have used co-op, by the way - I started having fun with the splitscreen multiplayer. Eventually I realized that bots could be customized, and even saved to memory cards. A couple of months went by, and as new games hit store shelves Red Faction II was somewhat forgotten. It would be revived, however, when a good friend and I decided to venture from home and become apartment roommates - as it turned out, he also enjoyed Red Faction II and had saved custom bots to his memory card.
Imagine spending several hours honing your very own AI team and leading them in a deathmatch against your friend and his AI. Now, imagine teaming up against eight AI players that are statistically almost as experienced as you are.
The resulting cooperative play and heavy teamwork was near-addictive, and although later trumped by the online adventure SOCOM, Red Faction II became the battleground from which two champions were born. Being able to tackle advanced AI that learned your tactics gave more meaning to each win (or loss), especially when the teams were tilted in the AI's favor. Two side-by-side buddies fragging the crap out of eight nasty, computer-controlled shootists beats plodding the levels of Onimusha any day. I'm sorry; it just does.
Red Faction II made dual-wielding cool long before Halo 2 did.
Following Red Faction II by a month, EA's 007 shooter Nightfire also opted against online play for splitscreen multiplayer with customizable bots, although not to the same degree. Now, Epic Games is probably the most prominent user of bots - including them in both Unreal Tournament III and the offline multiplayer modes in Gears of War 2 - but most developers are gravitating toward matchmaking systems. It's a bit of a shame, really, because bot matches were a good way to play a multiplayer game with a couch co-op twist. Today, we refer to bot matches as comp stomping...but for the most part that refers to the real-time strategy genre.
Some of my favorite gaming memories are rooted in local bot matches on a Saturday morning, pizza in hand and root beer standing by. Red Faction II headlined those memories, but recent years have seen the convenience of online gaming take over couch co-op. As 2009 was the year of co-op games, 2010 seems to be good breeding grounds for us to put the spotlight on the simple pleasure of splitscreen games and create some new offline memories.