Where's the multiplayer gone?

I've had a little bit of a revelation recently. I had a few mates round for a bit of a lads night, beer and Xbox, like old times. I was reminiscing back to days of Mario Kart and Golden Eye, four player madness, laughing like never before and frantic shouts, basically getting carried away. These memories are my fondest of gaming. I hadn't had a night like that in ages so I arranged it. There have been a lot of good games out on the 360 lately; Call of Duty 4, Skate, PGR4, all of which I had really enjoyed online (except for Skate, EA can't seem to do online justice) and I was really looking forward to taking a few mates to school. Here's where the disappointment came in. Game developers don't care about offline multiplayer any more.

All three games have severely stripped down versions of the online multiplayer for offline play. CoD4 has allowed you only to choose its pre-set classes, has fewer of the game modes and fewer maps. The classes do not have all of the perks and not all of the weapons. You cannot custom make your own classes. This is very disappointing. The game was still amazing fun, and I really cannot slate the game apart from this (see my review).

Skate, on the other hand, only allows players to play the type of games where you take it in turns. This, to be honest, is fucking shoddy! Their choice to do this might have been to do with not wanting to split the screens but I was really hoping to have competitions of "best trick" or freeskate and such. On the other hand I'm brought modes like "Spot battle" and "S-K-A-T-E". These modes are tedious as they need players to take it in turns. While appreciating your mates tricks is probably the idea, it can incredibly tedious. I certainly wish there could be death races or spot battles, some of the stuff that's on the online multiplayer.

PGR is the worst offender. I don't particularly like the game, I don't like racing games really, but I thought racing against mates would be fun... if I was actually allowed. The game only allows for two players to race against each other. This is SHIT! I'm sorry but when four controllers can be connected to an Xbox and you can probably have 8 players in a race, why the FUCK can't we play four player? This is just fucking stupid!

Anyway, I was very disappointed. I hate being disappointed. I know that it must be difficult for game devs to make a complete game in little time these days. There's the extra side to gaming these days, online gaming, which must take a lot more programming than before. I understand that this must make the work load double but these are just excuses to me because in my opinion they have taken a half arsed approach to one essential part of any game.

There's another thing. Wii has no problem making great offline multiplayer games, in fact, some may argue that all it has is great party games but for some reason it can't seem to get the online right. Is this the choice I'm going to have to put up with in future, one or the other? It makes me feel quite annoyed that I may never be able to play Warioware offline or that I might never play Skate with mates in a way that it was meant to be played.

Maybe I'm being silly. Maybe I should get with the times. Maybe I should just realise the facts that I have argued here. I just can't help but feel slightly cheated.