Mario Kart war journal, entry 2

Saturday, December 3, 2005 » gaming thought

120318 579651

Mario Kart online keeps dragging me back to the DS, despite the aggravation of people disconnecting mid-race and the inability to connect with friends over the WFC, which it turns out is probably caused by my Linksys WRT54G V5 router. I keep getting error code 86420, which is something about being unable to establish a UDP connection. Nintendo's official solution to this is to open every port to UDP connections, which strikes me as, hm, insane. I would have thought it would be best to design software to use as small of a port range as possible. Maybe someone just asked Shigeru Miyamoto which ports he thought would be best for Mario Kart. I imagine his answer would have been something like, "Let's not limit the game to just a few, dedicated ports but rather open it to all, whether they be young or old, TCP or UDP!"

Anyway, hopefully Nintendo and/or Linksys will get their act together soon and make with the firmware updating, which I pray will solve the connection issues for me, and apparently a bunch of other players out there in Internet forum land. Until then I will settle with playing people through random matchups. And, of course, mercilessly pre-judging them based on whether or not they pick the Dry Bomber.

The ranks of worthy opponents grow
Caboose
colin
Dark Link
Drew Clun
.:edh:.
EDMUND
gamer4life
Genesis
Gordy B.☹
Hyperbolt
ILoveTheDS
→∞Jason™←
Kawai
Kinopio★ (good race but get a better connection please, the lag jumping makes me dizzy)
Kirby5759
Kyocat83
LionConnor
LUIGI
Nimajneb
OmegaZero
Oxin
phun.e
shotgun
-SIC-
Slamamama?
Stir-Fry
Tee
Yodelyfsh
Zidapi

The Sore Losers' Club welcomes these disconnectors
adam
Becca
☆BOWSER☆
CNL21
Heist
Judecal
koolboy123
LNEOR (with L/R button icons)
↓LOSERS↑
Nasty Nate
Protoman
らいん
Recor☹
rizLa
SHIVER
Tom Nook
|VASH|♠♦♥♣ (hey maybe you'd win more races if those symbols weren't weighing your kart down??)
X-Legs

Snaker alert
Branskins™
IngSlayer
Kidicarus™

As a special end note, I'd also like to thank U.S. players colin, Dark Link, and Genesis for an unprecedented six 4-player races without any disconnects. And, since the two of you who did disconnect were doing quite well at the time, I'll assume you were just having some connection problems, or maybe you needed to go out and grab a taco or something. Some things just take precedence.