Gameover: The Weakest Link Edition
How was your gaming weekend? In addition to some lengthy home server maintenance this weekend I was able to spend far too much time playing Champions Of Norrath: Return To Arms for the PlayStation 2, including staying up very late last night. While doing so I discovered two critical things.
1. Return To Arms easily beats Marvel Ultimate Alliance for the PS3 in the hack-and-slash department.
2. It looks like the instability I’ve had when playing Return To Arms online has been my fault. My network configuration was the culprit!
First, I’ll talk about the part that’s not my fault.
Champions: Return To Arms is such a great hack-and-slash game compared to Marvel that I can’t believe I doubted its worthiness to sit on the throne. Maybe if I were a comic book fan I’d like Marvel more, but I’m finding playing the harder difficulty levels of Return To Arms with a friend to be so much more rewarding than playing through MUA.
Second, for a long time I’ve been very reluctant to think my home network setup could have been causing my problems with Return To Arms. Testing over the weekend confirmed it, and I’m taking additional steps in the coming days to isolate the problem. I’m pretty sure I know what it was — a very old hub in the mix — but more testing is needed. What a shame, I’ll just have to play Return to Arms online some more!
The short version is that one of two things was causing disconnects with the servers. One, too many switches and hubs between my router and my PS3 (and in the past, PS2). Second, the old hub the PS3 was plugged into might be causing problems with network traffic. By connecting the PS3 directly to the router I was able to confirm something in the mix was causing the problem by having absolutely no disconnect problems whatsoever. My next set of tests will revolve around using just one relatively new, higher quality switch between the router and my PS3, and I suspect that it will probably work just fine. The hub I had been using was quite old and had basically outlived its usefulness anyway.
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My gaming weekend was rather slow. I took my girlfriend out for her birthday, but we got some gaming action in Sunday night. We tag-teamed Aegis Wing, which was a TON of fun. She was getting nervous flying around all the bullets, which is where the genius of attachment comes in. She hit “X” which left me to pilot and she could focus on firing in all directions; it was fantastic.
After that I watched her play Gears and Uno over Live while I attacked Metroid Fusion on GBA (that game is all class).
This was all at the end of a very productive weekend, which was nice.
That attachment feature for Aegis Wing sounds great!
Wow nice. That’s the new free game too, I have to try that with my Wife.
@XT: Thanks but it wasn’t a repair it was an OS upgrade from Fedora Core 5 to 6 since 5 will become unsupported in a month or so.