11.11
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)
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