Does anyone remember the good ol' days where one could plug in 4 controllers, pick any multiplayer game off the shelf and just have fun with some buddies for an afternoon? Does anyone miss those days? As the current consoles get more and more entrenched in this online culture it seems that these sort of moments are becoming a rarity. Many games that have multiplayer modes for online practice have opted to completely remove the split screen versions of these modes, which makes very little sense in my mind that you would not give the player the option to play these modes offline with his or her friends.
 
Let me tell you about one instance where this came up recently for me. A few weeks ago my buddy, my girlfriend and I were sitting around just hanging out when we decided we wanted to play a game. The only requirement was that it had to support at least 3 player co-op on one XBox, because my girlfriend doesn't like to play games competitively (aka she isn't very good). So we go through my collection of 60+ 360 games and find not a single game that supports this need. Even games like Halo 3, which supports 4 players on an Xbox in multiplayer, and supports 4 player co-op online, would not allow more than 2 people per Xbox. Others games that come to mind where there have been arbitrary limits on player capacity per Xbox are the last few Modern Warfare 2, Call of Duty: World at War, Borderlands and ODST. 
 
So why do companies choose to not include split screen versions of their otherwise available online modes? For a game like Borderlands I could see that more than 2 screens on the same TV might get difficult to handle, but if you have a big enough TV why take that choice away from the player? Perhaps there is a technical reason for this limitation that I don't know about? But seems to me that a game able to support 4 people on the same screen in competitive multiplayer should be able to do the same for co-op.
 
So what does the GiantBomb community think? Does anyone miss the split screen gaming afternoons? Or do you think online multiplayer makes split screen gaming obsolete?