Yesterday, after about 30 minutes configuring ICS, bluetooth tethering and Windows XP port forwarding, I went online with an MTN 3G prepaid account with an allowance of 50 megs and funded with 500 Naira for a sole purpose: To determine whether or not, as has been alleged by certain people, online gaming has indeed come to Nigeria in an affordable way. You probably know what the answer is already (since I took the pain to explain my setup, heh heh…) but this is such exciting news that I feel I need to drag my verdict out a little….. just to add a bit of drama!

So without further ado, off we go!

1. First things first: The Suffering!
2. Second things second: A ray of hope!
3. Third things third: The testing!
4. Last things Last: The final word.

Those of us who bought Metal gear Solid 4 also paid for MGS Online, but have had to ignore its existence until now. Call of Duty has been limited to its brief campaign modes, with the enormous world of experience points, perks, Nazi Zombie mode, and other online features largely unattainable. Games with huge amounts of staying power have been confined to the shelf, sad reminders of experiences hitherto unattainable.

Not any longer!

 I am yet to test competitive shooters (I need either to recall my copies of COD for playstation from Anambra or Set up a paid Xbox LIVE account, whichever occurs first) but my experience with Resident Evil leaves me wildly optimistic. I had earlier on decided not to bother with Uncharted 2 or Killzone, since both games are largely dependent on multiplayer modes for their success, but with this development I just may put down the hard earned money to pick them up.

I am pleased to report that online gaming is coming to Nigeria at last. From all indications, when Glo-1 lands, things should be even better. For now, however, this is my setup:

PS: Providence? My ISP called me just as I was finishing this article to tell me they had fixed all their problems and would give me a free extension of service to try it out? Hmmm….

Soulcalibur 4:

My litmus test! Primarily because it is a fighting game, and such games typically demand the highest quality links. I have successfully played SC4 online before, but such sessions were plagued by dropped connections and the worst kind of lag. However it usually gives a good idea of just what to expect from a particular link. After some time setting up the port forwarding sessions, I was able to join a game and get a battle going.

Verdict: Pretty good! Most opponents appeared with a ‘signal strength’ rating of about 50%. Not bad! The truth is, there was lag, and there were irritating pauses and jerks in the gameplay. However for the most part, buffered moves would come out instantly, and blocking/defense appeared to be accurate to less than half a second. Against an opponent of similar skill, I found myself losing repeatedly, but when in control of the game to the extent that I hardly needed to execute a move on reaction of less than 300ms, I found the system to be playable and stable! Not once did the connection drop, which is also important. (dropped connections will earn you a bad name online)

Streetfighter 4:

The ultimate fighting game! Since Soulcalibur players have bad habits of disconnecting when they feel they are losing, I decided to try streetfighter, where players are penalised for bad sportsmanship. Of course SF has its own form of bad sportsmanship (the opponent waits for you to pick a character, then invariably picks Ken or Sagat) but playing in the friendly lobby yielded some satisfying matchups.

Verdict: Excellent! The major problem I noticed was that SF had almost three times the bandwidth usage of SC (around 4kilobytes per second sustained during a match) but had a response time that defied logic! I found last minute dragon punches, reaction blocks, and so forth were actually possible even with the latency! Of course this was uneven- at inopportune times the reaction speed would suddenly go down, and there were annoying pauses now and then, and playing with top players became impossible.  However it was thoroughly enjoyable, and exciting for that reason!

Resident Evil 5:

Now this was important. I used the fighting games to kick off the test because of their high requirements. Any link that supports a fighting game in a playable form should be excellent for a shooting game. I had intended to test using Metal Gear Online, but faced with an update that would definitely exhaust my meagre allowance (50 megabytes, would you believe it) I had to pass up on it. Resident evil supports a cooperative singleplayer mode. I fired it up, looked for a person waiting to play the first chapter, and logged on.

Verdict: Now THIS is the reason I wrote this article. The fighting games are playable, but not accurate or even remotely close to serious relevance in terms of proper competitive play. At best, they are nice ‘proofs of concept’. However Res5 was virtually flawless. My coop partner was a Canadian who, feeling I was new to the game, took it upon himself to give me a virtual tutorial and tour of the first two stages, even helping out by showing me the locations of the elusive BSAA emblems as we went along. There was also voice chat going on- seamlessly integrated into the gameplay! There was NO lag whatsoever- At no time did I see my aim go wildly off target, did I notice a delay between pulling the trigger and shooting, or did I see enemies teleporting about like nightcrawler. My partner did teleport a little, which may point to potential problems with competitive shooters down the line, but this was an almost 1 hour gaming time uninterrupted: NO disconnections!

In other words- I WAS PLAYING ONLINE FOR REAL WITH A PLAYER HALFWAY ACROSS THE WORLD. (emphasis intended)

4. Last things Last: The final word.

Of course, the rest is history!

I’m glad to say that on testing out the MTN 3G prepaid package, I was able to get latency figures similar to what he reported, and proceeded to set things up to allow my playstation to connect to the free playstation network. I then proceeded to test three games (Soulcalibur 4, Streetfighter 4 and Resident evil 5) and my findings are reported on the next page!

3. Third things third: The testing!

Now, Anyone who  has had to change ISP’s in our dear country is aware of the headaches of sub-Saharan Africa and the Internet- you have the GSM providers on one hand, with their wide coverage and good speeds due to recent flirtations with 3G,EDGE and HSDPA. Providers who, due to their primary desire to preserve their more valuable property (overpriced cellphone calls and SMS) impose ridiculous download caps with varied (but uniformly ugly) penalties for overshooting said limits- anything from summary disconnection to 15x to 30x price hikes.

On another hand, you have the CDMA providers, who are not (usually) as protective of their bandwidth, and offer the promise of good speeds and coverage due to widespread deployment of EVDO, but rarely deliver due to oversaturated networks and where they do deliver, usually mask high latencies behind their equally high speeds (buh?! Latency??? What that?!??!  If you really want to play games online, you owe it to yourself to find out what this is, so read on!)

And then you have the oddballs. Wimax, Cable modem providers, etc etc. Unified by a universal trade off: High setup costs versus horrible performance.

So far, the outlook is pretty bleak. Picking one from this lot is a tough (and expensive) proposition. And as a gamer, there are other things to look for. You see, games don’t just demand speed. There are two other key features (bear with me here, grammar wan begin plenty):

1. Latency: Unfortunately, no provider in Nigeria (to my knowledge) offers information on latency. It’s just a trial-and-error game of chance. So whats the difference between latency and bandwidth? Well this is the best way to explain it: if bandwidth is the speed at which netjuice pours through your internet pipe, latency is the time it takes for the flow to get to you. In other words, you may have a download of 100kbps, but a latency delay of 2000 ms (2 seconds). This means that in GEARS OF WAR, there will be a full four seconds between the time you pull the trigger, and the time your gun begins to fire. Not good.
2. NAT reachability: For whatever reason, both xbox live and playstation Network require us to perform some settings known as port forwarding in order to connect. Port forwarding is out of the scope of this article, but what we need to know is that some providers do not allow this, and anyone trying to game on such networks, regardless of latency and bandwidth, is SOL (sh*t out of luck)

With all the above, it’s pretty obvious that the most reliable source of information, besides blind random luck, would have to be a recommendation from a friend. Unfortunately, since many people are masters in the art of denial, and can happily spend hours playing an unplayable, jerking, lag-ridden session online mainly due to a stubborn refusal to accept the fact that ‘dem money don burn finish’ (thousands of Naira down the drain- tra la la….), I have had people make the most insane recommendations, both on and offline! Eventually I just came to the conclusion that since the SAT-3 (West Africa’s premier link to the civilised world) is unable to deliver the needed low latency, Nigerian gamers should just be content to lug their systems across the nation and be done with it.

2. Second things second: A ray of hope!

To start with, I’d like to mention the purpose of portlagos.com. Those who know me IRL know there are a few projects cooking in my as yet internet-virgin oven. From my chosen handle, it should also be obvious that they will (for the most part) be development projects, and (hopefully!) creative. At the moment, there’s an iPhone game, three webcomics, and (still on the drawing board) a Java mobile game. I’m really excited about the pace of progress on all of these and the world will see them soon! Exciting times, indeed.

Other possibilities, once things get going, will be podcasts, general gadget and videogame reviews, and commentary on tech, the internet, and subsaharan Africa in general. Portlagos.com will be the wellspring of these creations, and this blog will be my personal soapbox on which I will preach to whosoever will listen!

And now, the ball is rolling…..