The purpose of this post it to put a little more fire into the blaze of complaints that are surrounding the online issues with Tenkaichi 3. For those of you who don’t have the game, or haven’t tried the online component yet I will fill in the details.

It is the equivalent to fighting in slow-motion, with your hands tied behind your back, while having a seizure! The online piece is completely unplayable. If you don’t believe me watch this video of an online game, and then this video of a single player game! If you are interested in following the problem, a couple sources have attempted to pull together resources describing the state of a fix. If you just want a summary of the major events you can keep checking back here, and I am sure as soon as a fix is presented, and I know about it. It will be on here!

The basic state of a fix is that everyone spammed Nintendo and Atari with complaints about the problem. Nintendo has responded with:

Message(#6851-000639-1203\6391203)

Hello, I’m sorry to hear about the issues you’re having playing Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3 online. Our role in online play is matching players up. Once the match, race, or fight starts, you’re connected directly in a peer-to-peer format and no longer connected to Nintendo servers.

From the reports we have received, we have determined that this is an in-game peer-to-peer latency issue and not something that occurs through Nintendo’s servers. We have provided Atari information on how they can address this issue and recommend contacting them.

To get their contact information, go to the following web address and click on Atari: http://www.nintendo.com/corp/licensees.jsp

Nintendo of America Inc.
R.M. Rickets Nintendo’s home page: http://www.nintendo.com/ Power Line (Automated Product Info): (425) 885-7529

Atari has blamed in on the wireless network

Thank you for contacting Atari Support. Atari would like to sincerely apologize for any multiplayer lag issues you may be experiencing within Dragon Ball Z®: Budokai Tenkaichi 3.

If you are experiencing multiplayer lag, this may be due to Wifi wireless internet connections or poor signal from the your ISP. To resolve this issue, please ensure both players involved in multiplayer gameplay use a hard wired connection – this should solve current lag issues.Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience this might have caused you from enjoying Dragon Ball Z®: Budokai Tenkaichi 3 and thank you for your continued support.Thank You,Atari Support

but if you read over the Fix Budokai blog, you will notice references to numerous people who have attempted to fix the bug using a wired adapter for the Wii with no luck.

I don’t really care who fixes it, I just want it fixed. The game is great, and when I write up my review I will explain why it is a good game regardless of this feature. But this is ‘the feature’ that makes Tenkaichi 3 amazing as opposed to just great. Atari, Spike, and Nintendo need to put the Wii’s patching system to the test, and get this corrected ASAP.

Ok, so I tried to exchange my Espanol version of Forza 2 at Best Buy, but all they had were the Spanish versions! So I got cash back instead. My wife volunteered to go to Gamestop for me and buy Forza 2 - THE ENGLISH VERSION.

I come home from work today and she says, “I hope I did the right thing…..”

Apparently people are trading in their Marvel Ultimate Alliance/Forza 2 pack-ins at a blistering rate. She was able to grab a copy of the combo for $20 and spent the rest of the refund money (+$10 from her mother - the original purchaser of THE SPANISH VERSION) to buy an extra 360 controller.

Side note: Dan and I were bitching up a storm about how much current-gen controllers cost. I believe I would have to trade in my entire Gamecube collection to equal the cost of a Wii remote/nun-chunk combo.

Anyway, my wife and I had a great time playing the X-Men Legends games, but we had a bad experience with Ultimate Alliance for the Wii (thanks to Dan & our another co-worker for lending us the Wii and game.) with it’s tacked on Wii controls and blurry as hell graphics - blurry on my HD TV anyway.

We’re having a much better time with the 360 version. It plays like it should and the graphics are awesome. The frame rate is rather slow at times. We’re still within the first few hours of the game so I’ll report back on wether or not the frame rate is universally…. ug.

In case the title doesn’t give it away, I got the new Dragonball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3 for the Wii.  The game is fun, but I feel like I am starting from scratch because the controls are quite different than 2.  The other game goodies I got included, Mario Galaxy, an XBox 360, and Halo 3.  My XBox came with Ultimate Alliance and Forza 2, but if you listen to the podcast you will know, I am not really all that excited about either.I am happy with my loot, although I don’t have an HD television, so I will have to enjoy my XBox on standard definition television.   Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas/Chanukah/Kwanzaa/Some other holiday I probably missed.

Merry Christmas everyone! I am one happy gamer! My brother and I finished up our Halo 3 co-op game, and I’m about 3/4’s of the way through Bioshock (thanks Bucky!). Santa’s helpers were kind of enough to get me Assasian’s Creed, Mass Effect, The Orange Box, and Forza 2….. THE SPANISH VERSION.

I’d heard about these fully spanish-translated games. It seems like a great idea, but PLEASE make the “spanish only” label larger than a dime (or at least as large as one)!Basically my 2008 will consist of Triple AAA gaming and Spanish classes. :)I hope everyone else had a Triple AAA Christmas!

[insert appropriate holiday adjective here] [insert holiday here] to all. Sorry about the lack of 2nd Player content lately. All the members of the team have had different things come up over the last month, and it doesn’t seem to be slowing until after the holidays. Even though it isn’t audio goodness I wanted to put this entry out there to let everyone know what has been happening with 2nd Player over the last few months. Our listenership has been steady, so thank you to everyone who is spreading the word, keep up the good work! Because of rate of growth we decided we needed to start adding additional reasons to come to our site. These additional reasons were why we choose to start a hiatus. So what have we come up with.

Written Reviews

We want to provide raw opinions (directly from the author) about any game we have played or are currently playing. Each review will be a snapshot into the reviewer’s perspective, and not a watered down mashup of everyone’s opinions. We are also starting to pull in additional people to help us write reviews, and we will be announcing them at a later time. One thing we would definitely like to see is your thoughts on games. If you have a review you want to put out there, send us an email, or just post your comments on our existing reviews. We are hoping to build a community where people give their honest opinion about games, not some technical analysis of the game.

News Commentary

We realize that we currently don’t have any “in” into the industry. So the only thing of value we bring is our perspective, which we hope you will come to love and enjoy. So from now on when we see a piece of news that just hits us the wrong way, or gets us super excited, you can bet your grandma’s britches that we will be posting our thoughts. This will hopefully not take away from the podcast any, just give us additional fodder to talk about when we do each episode.

So that is the new direction. We are going to attempt to start the podcast back up after the new year, but you should start seeing reviews appear over the next couple days. And I am sure news story commentary will start happening sometime this week as well. As always leave your comments, or send us emails. And thanks for listening/reading!