Le Sigh

*sigh* this is another case of people's routers not being friendly with XBL.

Are you guys forwarding your ports properly? This game (along with games like street fighter) and such, likely were not tested with people who haven't properly set up their routers to forward data out through the right ports.

You will have next to no multiplayer problems in ANY of those games if you all just took the little bit of effort required to make sure all of your ports are correctly forwarded. (well, not true, PSU and Gears of War will still have buggy chat problems)

I have emailed Microsoft a dozen times to at LEAST warn people if their settings don't say "open NAT" in the test screen, that they WILL have problems with a number of games.

Hell, I think MS shouldn't even allow you guys to get online, it should keep flashing "fix your damn routers you numbnuts" so that you don't mess up the game experience for the rest of us that have done it.

Should XBL even require this? Well, hey, you want ubiquitous voice WHILE playing? They're using different ports for the different servers. Can't be helped. So quit yer moaning, make sure your routers are set up properly. (As in, make sure when you test your connection, it says "NAT: OPEN")

Actually, joystiq, it would be nice if you could help the community out and provide this information for everyone.

I almost threw my xbox out the window with all the problems chromehounds had since I spent the better time of every night walking people through their router settings.

Does it suck? Yeah. But unfortunately, it's a necessary evil due to the way the service works. Ask Linksys to make it EASY for people to quickly make their router work on XBL. Their port forwarding page is still daunting for most users.

To quickly clear things up:

HD-DVD and Bluray SUPPORT the same codecs: Mpeg 2, Mpeg 4 (H.264), and VC-1 (Microsoft's Codec)

The difference is what the movies are actually encoded WITH.

All titles so far on HD-DVD have used VC-1.
All titles so far on Bluray have used MPEG 2.

They can achieve the same quality, but the difference is that at any given quality, VC-1's filesize will be FAR smaller than MPEG 2.

The reason why this is of concern, is that, unfortunately for bluray, they have not been successful at mass producing the 50GB disks. In order to fit the movies on a 25GB disk, using MPEG 2, they needed to compress the movies heavier than HD-DVD, with its 30GB disks and VC-1.

The result is that across the board, HD-DVD titles have looked superior to Bluray titles.

Why did Sony use MPEG 2 when the players support VC-1? Probably because they don't want to pay any royalties to Microsoft. Who knows.. it's a pretty boneheaded (and cocky) move, especially since it has bit them in the a$$ since the 25GB disks don't hold enough for the weaker compression of MPEG 2.