Welcome from the bandwidth vacant Robot Factory. Actually I'm in zor's room, but them's the breaks when you have no internet. I'm not sure what issue is going on between our provider and Jeremy, but it sucks and I want to kill someone. Trying to go through a work week without being able to update a blog or check my email at home is a new kind of hassle I don't need.
Speaking of things that are a hassle, let's talk about Battlefront 2, and why it sucks on XBox live. Look, I'm not a huge user of Live. Since my XBox doesn't play nicely with any others, the only chance I get to play live is when I go to a friend's house. Since my house is know as the "video game mecca" most of my friends are lagging behind . . . and then there is Rich.
Mike and I went to Rich's place for a while to play some games and watch a football game. We wanted to play Battlefront 2, a game that we absolutely loved in the local multiplayer and co-op modes. Well, it sucks on live. We just couldn't find a server that didn't have some sort of lag issue. There weren't that many players, and for the most part the game was either broken or not fun. All in all, it fucking sucked.
So maybe the problem was with live. I played BF2 locally and loved it. To test this Rich puts in Halo 2, which has the best live functionality ever. We were quickly able to get a game going, and we were continually outclassed, but it was still fun. Damn it was fun. I just don't get how one game uses live so well, and a game made more than a year later uses it so poorly. I though one of the things that Live was supposed to do it make it so that each company didn't have to handle their own online shit (like the PCs have to do . . . I wonder how that is going? Brad?). This was a good thing, right?! Well it turns out that is doesn't create equity amongst all the games. I don't get it. Maybe it is because I don't program for shit, so I don't understand the elegant balance of packets to be sent and recieved in order for a streamlined experience, but as a user of a few of these systems, I don't understand why other people don't just use the same idea as was successful a year ago.
Let's turn the page to another online system we got running at the same time. I took us a while to get it to work, but Nintendo WiFi seems to be the real deal. All of us had gotten Mario Kart DS, and were itching to play it across, as Rich puts it "the interweb." There were some issues we had (you can't add someone to your friends list unless you either get their # or you play locally with them), but in the end the setup was super simple. You make sure you can get some wireless access from your (or anyone else's) router, press go, set up the type of game you want (worldwide, rival, friend, regional) and away you go. NWC (what Nintendo is calling the Wifi Community) sets you up with 2 or 3 competitors and away you go. The track you play is based on a vote by the players, and you play a quick grand prix of four races. It was so simple that (if we didn't have the issues with a WEP protected router) you wouldn't have even known that we needed to do anything. I'll talk about the problems I have with the game, but right now Mario Kart DS is fucking awesome.
Speaking of things that are a hassle, let's talk about Battlefront 2, and why it sucks on XBox live. Look, I'm not a huge user of Live. Since my XBox doesn't play nicely with any others, the only chance I get to play live is when I go to a friend's house. Since my house is know as the "video game mecca" most of my friends are lagging behind . . . and then there is Rich.
Mike and I went to Rich's place for a while to play some games and watch a football game. We wanted to play Battlefront 2, a game that we absolutely loved in the local multiplayer and co-op modes. Well, it sucks on live. We just couldn't find a server that didn't have some sort of lag issue. There weren't that many players, and for the most part the game was either broken or not fun. All in all, it fucking sucked.
So maybe the problem was with live. I played BF2 locally and loved it. To test this Rich puts in Halo 2, which has the best live functionality ever. We were quickly able to get a game going, and we were continually outclassed, but it was still fun. Damn it was fun. I just don't get how one game uses live so well, and a game made more than a year later uses it so poorly. I though one of the things that Live was supposed to do it make it so that each company didn't have to handle their own online shit (like the PCs have to do . . . I wonder how that is going? Brad?). This was a good thing, right?! Well it turns out that is doesn't create equity amongst all the games. I don't get it. Maybe it is because I don't program for shit, so I don't understand the elegant balance of packets to be sent and recieved in order for a streamlined experience, but as a user of a few of these systems, I don't understand why other people don't just use the same idea as was successful a year ago.
Let's turn the page to another online system we got running at the same time. I took us a while to get it to work, but Nintendo WiFi seems to be the real deal. All of us had gotten Mario Kart DS, and were itching to play it across, as Rich puts it "the interweb." There were some issues we had (you can't add someone to your friends list unless you either get their # or you play locally with them), but in the end the setup was super simple. You make sure you can get some wireless access from your (or anyone else's) router, press go, set up the type of game you want (worldwide, rival, friend, regional) and away you go. NWC (what Nintendo is calling the Wifi Community) sets you up with 2 or 3 competitors and away you go. The track you play is based on a vote by the players, and you play a quick grand prix of four races. It was so simple that (if we didn't have the issues with a WEP protected router) you wouldn't have even known that we needed to do anything. I'll talk about the problems I have with the game, but right now Mario Kart DS is fucking awesome.
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