The Best and Worst Videogames for Date Night

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No before we start this article there’s a certain section of the audience that we need to address right away. That’s the people who are saying “Playing videogames on date night? But girls don’t play videogames!” Firstly, you are very wrong. A quick bit of googling shows that the gender breakdown for videogames is something like 56% male to 44% female, and the dedication of those women to gaming becomes even more impressive if you’ve ever spent five seconds in the comments section of a gaming site.


Secondly, gaming can actually be a really great date night activity. If gaming is what you do for fun, then what could be better than sharing that activity with the person you love? However, although gaming can be a great romantic activity, it’s important to pick the right game. So far that reason, here are three games that can make for a great date night, and two you should probably avoid.

The Best Games for Date Night

Portal 2
The best games for a romantic evening in are collaborative games. Games that will spark conversation and that allow you to solve problems together. Portal 2’s co-op mode is the perfect example of this. For those who don’t know, Portal is a puzzle game where you are equipped with a gun that shoots wormholes.

Using this gun you navigate complex obstacle courses, and as time goes on you find some sophisticated uses for the gun, such as using it to help you traverse a long gap by falling quickly through one mouth of the wormhole and shooting out the other end at high speed. While the puzzles range from the tricky to the mind bending, you can have great fun figuring them out together.

Minecraft
Oh what is there to say about Minecraft? Minecraft will ruin your life. It’s a building game that starts out like you’ve been given the greatest Lego set in the world, until you realise you can break the wooden blocks down into sticks, and use the sticks to make tools, and use the tools to mine coal and stones, and use those to make a furnace, and suddenly you’re building a working 16 bit computer, or a scale model of Middle Earth.

What’s more, you’ve got a procedurally generated play area that is literally bigger than the planet Earth. So you can build gigantic palaces made of glass, or simply go exploring together. Just remember to build yourself somewhere safe to stay during the night to avoid being eaten by zombies, skeletons, giant spiders and the dreaded creepers...

LA Noire
LA Noire is a game that doesn’t actually have a multiplayer function. What it does have is a richly detailed period environment, a complex plot and pretty much the entire cast of Mad Men. You can have fun taking it in turns to do the driving sequences, but the real fun to be had here is in the interrogation scenes, when you can get into some quite impassioned arguments over whether the suspect is telling the truth or has something to hide. Maybe skip the flame thrower-in-the-sewers finale though.

The Games to Avoid on Date Night

Any of the Halo Games
I’ll be honest with you, there are few things in this life I find more amusing than sneaking up behind one of my dearest friends in Halo 3 and smacking them to the far end of the map a gravity hammer, watching their corpse do that hilarious front crawl animation before they run slap bang into a tree trunk.

However, as fun as this is, it’s not the sort of activity that is likely to engender amorous feelings in the one you love (or for that matter, in yourself after they sneak up behind you with a gravity hammer). You know, unless you’re both into that.

Left 4 Dead
Left 4 Dead is a collaborative game based around the universally beloved theme of killing hordes upon hordes of the undead. It’s great fun, but it’s probably not the best game for date night, for the following reason: It brings out your absolute basest survival instincts, and unless you’ve got a really solid relationship, you don’t want your partner to see those unless absolutely necessary.

Do you really want your love to see how you refuse to heal them as they’re limping along, because you “might need the first aid kit later”? Do you really want them to see just how quickly you are willing to run to the escape boat and leave you to die?

Trust is, there are some things in a relationship it is best to keep a secret.

Jason Falls is a freelance writer and avid gamer, when he’s not working for Butlers Bingo.