XBLA Golden Axe and… lag?
Posted by Graham. Filed under G, Microsoft Xbox 360, News. Tagged with Golden Axe, Sega Vintage Collection, XBLA.
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Well about a day ago we reported (along with almost every other gaming site in the world), the news that Sega would indeed be bringing the Sega Vintage Collection, (initially denied by Sega, then suddenly revealed to be true a month or so later), and with that news the first couple of games were, almost, immediately available for download, Sonic and Golden Axe.
Now, many people already own Sonic and Golden Axe, about 10 times over, and while Sonic does not seem to have anything extra (apart from Achievement points), Golden Axe offered something, very sexy, for us Sega Nerds, online cooperative play. Meaning that you can team up with a mate online and play through the entire single player mode. Hurrah!
Yeah, you are all waving your fist at the screen saying, “We already know this {insert humorous insult here}, get to the point!”.
Well, both Chris and I, decided to jump on Golden Axe earlier today and see just how much fun the game could be in online mode. Fingers tingling with anticipation, we logged on and Chris setup a game, and I joined him. Easy. We start the game, after the brief ‘cutscene’ where you talk to a wounded guy, we start to play. Immediately, I got confused. I couldn’t work out which character I was, I was pressing buttons, but none of the characters seemed to be responding to my controller.Â
It took me a few seconds, to work out that there was a pretty big delay, between my button press and my character movements. I thought my batteries were low in my controller or something, but I actually had my controller plugged into my 360, charging, so it wasn’t that. It was something little more worrying.
After much whining, on my part, we exited and I hosted the game. We get into the game, same thing, but in reverse. It was Chris’ time to complain. If you are wondering, the ‘lag’ is consistent throughout, and after pressing a button, your character will make that action a good clean second (sometimes two) later. That may not sound like much, but believe us, when you are fighting for your life, it can be a great pain. We actually played through the game, Chris died just before I finished off Death Adder. But we then decided to restart our PCs and 360’s - just in case something was slowing our connections down.
We restart everything, log back in, Chris hosts again - and yet still I have a pretty bad case of lag. Now, you may think that we have slow connections or something, but right after playing through the game again, we both put in ChromeHounds, and played that online, completely lag free.
Now it is a shocking thing to think, that an old 16-bit game suffers from continuous lag, while a newer Next Gen title, with some pretty great graphics and huge open worlds, suffers from none at all. Could it be in Sega programming of the game? Or something to do with Xbox Live Arcade?
If anyone else has experienced this, please let us know. Or if you have managed to play Golden Axe online, lag free, definitely leave a comment. Let’s just hope future online ‘Vintage Collection’ titles run better online.
Comments on this article
There have been 11 responses to this article.
Nope, no lag here. Plays like a charm.
Cyberbeast
Posted July 12th, 2007 at 12:06 pm.
Xbox Live Arcade works via direct P2P connection for every player connected to a game, not on any dedicated servers provided by Microsoft or any of the game developers or publishers. Therefore whatever lag you experience is directly the fault of your or your friend’s ISP. This is common knowledge.
Nathan
Posted July 12th, 2007 at 12:39 pm.
NOTICE: ALL THE RIGHTS LAG.
The GagaMann
Posted July 12th, 2007 at 1:18 pm.
I get more lag sometimes when I’m joining people’s games rather than hosting them myself as well, but nothing like 2 seconds. It’s more like half a second lag, but again this doesn’t happen always. Other XBLA games I’ve played online did this sometimes too, such as Double Dragon and espically Contra(poor programming). So I don’t think Sega are to blame here.
Kogen
Posted July 12th, 2007 at 1:28 pm.
I still think it is a little weird. As I have played a few other XBLA games online before now - and never noticed any lag before.
It’s also weird that its constant. Usually I find lag will be inconsistent- like I will be playing fine and then the controls will slow or characters will jerk along. But this is with everysingle button press, there is a delay.
Hopefully either mine or Chris’ connection was just being very slow today, and it will be ok next time. Although if one of us is slow, should that effect the other? We both tried hosting and both had exactly the same problem playing on the others game.
G
Posted July 12th, 2007 at 1:38 pm.
I understand that Nathan, but Graham and I were playing Golden Axe, and the game was barely playable due to incredibly bad lag. We then switch to Chromehounds, which has to require a faster connection, and it plays totally lag free.
While I agree, each person connected needs to have a good connection, it’s also up to the developer to optimize the game for online play. And unless something really funky was going on yesterday, I don’t think Sega did that.
Chris
Posted July 12th, 2007 at 1:48 pm.
I don’t think Golden Axe has a dedicated server, like Chromehounds, in Golden Axe the person making the game acts as the server, meaning you should have good uploading speed.
Whats your guys uploading speed?
George
Posted July 12th, 2007 at 4:14 pm.
You two clearly don’t work together. Maybe it’s time you split up, met new people, and accepted what they had to offer. Strangers might not seem appealing at first and it might hurt for awhile, but this is probably the best way to go.
Kogen
Posted July 12th, 2007 at 4:33 pm.
one is in Guam and the other is Europe.
George
Posted July 12th, 2007 at 4:59 pm.
I agree. I played one time in co-op mode where someone else was hosting. Thank god for unlimited continues. That delay made me look like a fool. I assumed that the other guy was just better at playing through the lag than me, but maybe he wasn’t experiencing it at all.
I’m in Alaska though.
Emmett The Crab
Posted July 12th, 2007 at 10:37 pm.
Kogen, the sexual attraction is just far too strong for us to ever split up…. ;)
Yes, at least someone else has experienced it, Emmett. :)
-Though when Chris and I played - whoever hosted played the game fine, it was when we joined the others game, it was bad.
So the guy you were playing with was most likely ok… which means he probably thought you sucked ;)
G
Posted July 13th, 2007 at 12:05 am.