So, we have started an experiment with netplay via PlayStation emulation and our results have been pretty spotty. Somehow we have managed to log around 6 hours of playtime on Tales of Destiny. When the multiplayer works, the combat is quite fun! I've been controlling Mary and my co-op partner Stahn. Battles seem to go by a lot faster when you don't have to rely on the questionable AI. Getting the netplay to work at all was quite the ordeal, though.
After fiddling with firewalls, port forwarding, synchronization of emulation settings, and a lot of trial and error, we finally got the game running with both of us in the game. In the case of Tales of Destiny, you are restricted to one party member for the first 45 minutes to an hour or so. We were both present in the game and I was watching my co-op partner control the protagonist, Stahn. It seemed like all was well. After a certain period of time, he obtained his first party members. Garr and the girl seemed like they were probably temporary characters--but we were unable to figure out any way to assign control of them to a second player. I did some research and it turned out that you had to equip an accessory (Channeling Ring) to assign control to a different player at all.
We thought this was a little strange, but I was completely fine with waiting until we found it. By the time we found it, we'd acquired what is ostensibly a permanent party member in Mary. She's a melee fighter much like Stahn himself. When we finally found the ring we equipped it to Mary. Unfortunately, once we got into combat, Mary just stood there and did nothing. None of my buttons did a thing. We'd already been playing for some time and despite quite a bit of experimentation we couldn't figure out how to get it to work--so we retired for the night.
The next day we decided to try it again. We tried a number of things until I alt+tabbed out of the window for something unrelated. After returning to the window I found that I then had control. We tested this a few times and found that this allowed me to assume control every single time--for reasons that are completely unknown to me. After going through so much to get this game to work at all, we were excited to finally both have control of characters in combat. For quite awhile, everything progressed without incident. I feel like the game's a lot more fun when you're playing it mutiplayer, actually.
After awhile, we started running into more issues. Every so often the music would start skipping and we would get desynced. What this means is that despite the netplay plugin attempting to keep us connecting, we began to run two individual versions of the game simultaneously. I would be given complete control and so would he--in completely separate instances. This seemed to happen completely at random. It could happen every ten minutes or every two hours. It was annoying to say the least. Compounding the annoyance is the fact that once my co-op partner finally gets to a save point, he has to send me his memory card data to sync up our games again.
I would like to keep playing because it is legitimately fun while it's working correctly, but I'm not entirely sure it's worth the trouble. There are a few more things I'd like to try, of course. We haven't experimented with save states and all. Initially we thought they might be completely disabled in netplay, but I'm not so sure. Save states were very useful in ZSNES for syncing back up after something caused us to desync--but in that case it happened much less frequently.
No comments:
Post a Comment