My first experience with Xbox Network online and online games in general
Enjoy!
The online multiplayer has been with us for almost 2 decades making us experience a new way of sharing games with the world and although since the beginning I have been much more interested in singleplayer experiences I have had a close relationship with the online modes of many games, although today I would like to share my first time playing against the world, at that time I had no idea that such a technology existed and I doubted many times if they were really people on the other side of the screen or were a new type of bot, also the internet a couple of years ago is not the same as the one we have today so if it was already difficult to connect to the network imagine having to connect to an experimental server that not even the big tech companies understood back then, playing online was a whole process in which the most hardcore gamers were even having doubts but I must say that time gave the reason to this kind of experiences and not long after having my first consoles I would find this feature in many games.
There were so many situations against but still multiplayer ended up finding me when I was about 10 years old, I was a diehard fan of games like Crash Bandicoot or Mario but recently a relative had bought a new console, the Xbox, it was the new from Microsoft but I remember it was already a few years ago that it had been released, so I assume they already had a little more polished the Xbox Live package that allowed not only access to some features and bonuses that Microsoft gave but also allowed to enter their servers and play online some games!!! Just to clarify, Xbox Live was not the first service to offer an online version of their games, Sega already had several years with SegaNet although it did not end up impacting the market and even Sony with its Playstation 2 was already testing this option on their consoles without counting that PC gamers were already playing online for a long time, but for some strange reason I thought back then that Xbox Live was unique in every way, a unique door to enjoy this experience, I remember that one day I got home and I started to investigate what steps had to be done to play online, I had games like Halo 2 that I had seen that could be played online so I was hopeful.
By that time you needed to connect the Ethernet cable to the console's integrated port (some consoles like Sega's even came with a peripheral and modem! ) plus the maximum connection in my town was nothing like what we have today, god it wasn't even decent by the standards of the time, but I was very clear that I wanted to play online so I realized that Halo 2 could be played on a kind of server with other people through Xbox Live, I asked my parents to buy a subscription for the service (although Microsoft ended up giving it away) and when the time came I had everything ready to enter the future...
Yes, my internet was too slow...
I mean, if I could enter the Xbox Network servers but there was too much lag in between to play a decent game, besides I couldn't enter a public game but the game itself gave you some modes that you could play and then you had to pray that it didn't load an error and you could enter the server, it was frustrating at times because there were games where I enjoyed a lot (Halo 2 is a great game too) but at some point began to have lag and then the game would fall down, I guess at that time the technology was not developed enough to support the internet of less than 1MB that was in my house, I was playing a version a little less primitive but had not yet found its moment to shine, even so I enjoyed a lot just to see the players that came out of the spawn and acted like real humans, people from the other side of the screen were there and I could see them and interact with them, I think that marked my experience with video games to this day.
Halo 2 was the only game I played on Xbox Network because a couple of weeks later the Xbox 360 would come out and I think I lost a little taste for the classic, even my uncle has it saved somewhere and we even have the original games, I'm not sure if there was another game besides Halo that could be played online but with the shutdown of the first Xbox servers in 2010 I lost all hope of playing online until much later when I discovered Battlefield and the online mode became my daily routine (I even won a Bad Company 2 championship) but I think that first experience, among so many cables and confusing instructions to make everything work correctly made me value a little more what we have today, where we can connect at any time we want on our PC or console. Thank you very much for stopping by!!
Note: I put some images of the remastered version of Halo 2 just because it looked cool for the post :)