Last week, one of my favorite video games of the past few years, Push Me Pull You, launched on PlayStation 4 (with a PC/Mac/Linux version “coming soon”). It’s not the best game of the year by any stretch, and it may not even be the best multiplayer game that we see this year—but it’ll almost surely top my year-end list.

Why? I’m a couch-combat freak. Blame my first job as a video game critic in the mid- to late-’90s, which steered me away from LAN parties and solo RPG adventures toward the N64’s impressive four-player library. I was my newspaper’s lead Nintendo console game critic until 2001, and while that meant first dibs on classics like Ocarina of Time, I tended to salivate more over things like the latest AKI Corporation wrestling game or the Turok games that actually had multiplayer modes. (I also pre-ordered the Expansion Pak the moment I learned it’d be required for Perfect Dark four-player deathmatch.) A single screen and four friends in the same room are damn-near essential to my digital diet.

While I’m tempted to retread old ground with a massive history-of-couch-gaming feature, I’d rather take the opportunity to celebrate Push Me Pull You‘s launch with a quick look at the best modern games in the genre. To qualify for this article, games must offer a minimum of four players sharing the same screen, they must play on modern platforms, and Ars can’t have already written about them extensively. My thinking here: nobody would blame you for skipping PMPY if you don’t have a nice four-controller setup on your favorite game console or TV computer. But if the game makes you think about ponying up for more pads, you should probably have a least a few other games to share with so many friends.