There‘s also an excellent Gameboy Color romhack of Dr Mario that supports multiplayer. Recently tried that out with my girlfriend and it was a lot of fun.
Edit: this is it for anyone interested. Looks like even the original version for the Gameboy supports multiplayer.
When you get lines, your opponent's stack pushes a line with a gap up from below, except when you get a Tetris, which pushes four lines (with the gap aligned, so you could Tetris back and forth).
You had an indicator for the max height of your opponent's stack next to yours.
If you haven't experienced multiplayer tetris from the modern remakes you may be in for a treat. It's a lot of fun when you're up against someone of similar skill. At least one switch version includes ranked matchmaking (Puyopuyo Tetris).
back in the late 00's there was (maybe still is, who knows) an online service called "gamefly" where you could rent games. At the time the DS pokemon games would allow you to plug in a pokemon GBA cart and copy the pokemon from the GBA to your DS. So I would constantly rent GBA Pokemon games in hopes of finding something good on them to copy to my DS Pokemon game. I had it all scheduled out and everything. You could also wondertrade hacked pokemon or like really good pokemon online. I don't remember exactly HOW you did it but I do remembering doing it.
Were they common? Well, just look at the GameBoy pocket. At the time it was designed (it released 7 years after the original GameBoy) there were a lot of people at Nintendo who wanted to get rid of the port entirely because it was barely ever used. They ended up compromising by using a different, smaller, cheaper port that needed an adapter to work with the regular ones.
Which was kind of a pain for some people because the GB Pocket and Pokemon both came out in Japan in 1996 lol.
RC pro am in the big bathroom with 4 stalls, passing the link cable under the dividers. Best way to skip class ever. Only ever managed 4 players a couple times but it was amazing.
IIRC you only needed like one copy of the game, too??
It's true. I had a brother; he refused to trade with me. I still have a brother, and I'm sure he'd trade with me now, but we're in our (late) 30s, and so Pokemon time has certainly declined.
I think local multiplayer absolutely peaked with the Nintendo DS. The download games where you could play with one cartridge, multiplayer without wifi, pictochat. Today you have to subscribe to shitty online services or at least play through wifi, which completely annihilates the possibility to play in a car, bus or train without a router.
I remember it for Pokemon, but also for those Zelda games that were a pair - Oracle of Ages/Seasons? But I don't think it let you do much, just continue a game save when you finished one of the two games.
Four Swords is the most competitive co-op game I have ever played. It's brutally fun, but you're going to want to punch your friends in the throat after about 30 minutes.
It had both! You could use either a link cable or a password to continue your game in the opposite title, and to bring over the rings you had from the original save. At the jeweler's shop, the red snake was for password transfers and the blue snake was for link cable transfers!
I’ve only seen that done for the TCG to do trades. Odd how a video game series turned into a franchise with a trading card game got a video game adaption of the trading card game.
Only on games that were designed to use the IR. It was limited to Mystery-Gift-type quick transfers due to the low data speed and the need to keep the systems pointed directly at each other.
I was a transparent purple homie. Ended up having to write my name on it because all my friends were too and we didn't wanna accidentally switch them up. One of the group was notorious for not taking care of his shit and I didn't wanna end up swapping with him on accident and getting a janky boi