As I write this, Sweden are bathing in the afterglow of winning the World International Cup, having crushed the Argentinians with a 4-0 victory every Swede should be proud of. And yet I am the only person who knows or cares.

I bought Pro Evolution Soccer 5 at the beginning of this week. It had been on my priority-purchase list for a while, and I managed to find a second-hand copy for 200 crowns (£14.50). Since I’m currently on a week’s holiday, this has meant some quality time in front of the TV.

One of its interesting qualities is a multiplayer co-op mode. This, along with the well-implemented graphics and solid AI, was the main reason for its newfound home. I thought it would be something Jo and I could indulge in, on the cold, dark nights when House, Lost, CSI or Idol aren’t on (meaning, essentially, the weekends), but I was wrong: Jo doesn’t really like football games.

We haven’t been playing together too much recently. LEGO Star Wars was a nice waste of time (though far too short and with a silly fixed camera angle that made for unnecessary guesswork), and before that the distant memory of X-Men 2 still lingers as one of the better co-ops we’ve completed. It is not for wont of trying , though: there just doesn’t seem to be more than a handful of suitable co-ops around, even if one includes the poor-average rated games for consoles.

This is actually an interesting development in my choice of videogames. Before I was was quite happy to ignore the vast majority in favour of those that had been deemed to be brilliant by the cognoscenti. Of all genres, I only “dislike” FPS‘s, so there was still a lot of scope for finding enough games to keep me amused. Nowadays, though, most of my console playing has to be co-op. And the strange thing is, I find a mediocre co-op game to be more enjoyable than a good single-player.

I cannot even imagine a change to this current situation. Whilst portable gaming devices (DS and PSP) offer their form of connectivity, and next-gen consoles are “broadband-ready”, there is no chance that “one console, one TV, two-players” games can ever be better than good. The very medium they work on (one TV screen) limits players freedom: freedom to move and freedom to change angles.

What our gaming experience will be like in 5 or 10 years relies on developers having a major breakthrough in thinking, or simply that we change our method of playing. I’d put money on the latter.

NB: Sweden won on Easy setting.