It was sometime during the youthful and care-free years of elementary school that my parents bought my sister and me a Sega Genesis. The system also came with Sonic 2... which might be one the best video games ever made... as I'm pretty sure that the hours of jumping and spinning a little blue hedgehog changed my life forever.

Even as much as hearing the shitty FM synth music on YouTube brings back memories... I also have played and beaten almost¹ every Sonic game on the Genesis. When the time of the old 16-bit system came and went, I even downloaded an emulator on my PC and replayed most of the games (or at least my favorite parts). More recently, I played them on my phone with a Smartphone-based Genesis emulator. Interesting how it took dedicated hardware back in elementary school to do now what can be done in software real-time on my phone...

Anyway... I regressed into my childish pastimes of playing console video games and recently purchased a Nintendo DS. First of all... I was amazed at how advanced 7th generation handheld systems are; the DS can pump out 3D graphics comparable to the Nintendo 64 and comes with onboard Wi-Fi... both for ad-hoc gaming with a friend close by or over the Internet to play with people all over the world. Badass.

One of the games I bought was Sonic Adventure Rush... one of the most recent additions to the Sonic franchise. I had high hopes and high expectations; the format was similar to the Genesis games... run as fast-as-hell to the right of the screen, pickup rings, and don't die.

I was happy to see that the new additions Sonic had seen since my first exposure to the series 10 years ago didn't take away from the game and render it an unfamiliar generic platform game-- it was the exact opposite actually. The new game on DS is faster and crazier than its little brother on Genesis... but it retains the same spirit.

There's enough in common with the old game to make me feel like I'm back in the prepubescent and innocent years of elementary school... and that's probably why I love playing it. It provides a small amount of escapism from the quickly-approaching "real life" that is less than a year away. I'm just glad that at 21 years old, jumping off of springs and collecting golden rings still has the ability to entertain me for a while.

Now if you will excuse me... I'm going to go play some Sonic on my DS.

I feel obligated to post how I managed to get both my roommate and myself connected to C&C3 online at the same time under the same router, because I haven't seen the solution anywhere else. Hopefully, Google will do it's job and direct anybody with a similar problem here.

The situation: Both my roommate and I (running Windows Vista) want to play C&C3 online at the same time, both connected via wireless to the Linksys WRT54G router.

Normally, getting a game to work online involves opening a port, so the router can know to whom to direct network traffic. C&C: Generals was like this. No biggie! Open up two different ports: one pointing to me, and one pointing to him... and then change the setting in the game.

C&C3 posses a problem in that it requires a LARGE amount of ports open to work that you CANNOT change from within the game. You can set a single port to watch, but the game itself requires a large range to work.

The solution: Port triggering. Port triggering is like port forwarding that activates when a client starts talking to a specific port. This allows selective port forwarding as each client needs it and thus, we both have access to the full range of ports needed to run the game. The probability of collisions is low, given the large range. So the settings look like this:

• Set ports 2049 through 29910 to be triggering ports
• Set any port NOT in that range to be forwarded to a specific player on the network. Do this for all players.
• Then, in the Options->Network tab in the game, type in your port that you forwarded in the previous step.

And you're done! If anybody else tries this, let me know, as I'm curious as to whether it really works... or it was just a fluke that it worked for us.

There is a known issue that if one of us hosts an online game, and the other joins AND somebody outside the network joins the game, both of our games (and the router!) crash when the game is loading. However, playing 1v1 online against my roommate works, and playing in different games online at the same times work, and hosting games works.