These days it’s almost sacrilege to publish a game without a multiplayer option. It’s become commonplace for the single-player campaigns to act as nothing more than training for multiplayer modes. Whether you choose to play your games with friends online or offline, each of the games in consideration for the 2008 Best Multiplayer Game Ever were great fun to play with others. It may have taken forever for the online patch to come out, but Castle Crashers' offline multiplayer mode was so much fun, we hardly noticed. Even though the online modes of Grand Theft Auto IV and Fable 2 couldn’t be more different, they each showcased just how well sandbox gameplay could translate online. While Call of Duty: World at War pretty much copied and pasted what worked so well in Call of Duty 4, Gears of War 2 at least introduced gamers the massively addictive Horde mode. Playing through any of the levels in LittleBigPlanet with a friend was fun, but didn’t demand you to play with others.

Multiplayer modes give games a great amount of replay value, and even though all the games we played with buddies this year provided us with endless entertainment, only one game was built to play with others.

Related Articles:

Review - Castle Crashers

Review - Left4Dead

Review - Fable II