Having not been able to play Burnout 3 online for weeks (“Unable to open communications to other players”), and never having managed a full game of FIFA 2004 (disconnected after the first few minutes, on the rare occasions I got a connection to another player in the first place), I spent the last couple of evenings looking into why my connection to EA’s flaky-at-best-anyway servers was so poor. I disabled firewalls, opened every port going, put the PS2 in the DMZ, all to no avail. The only thing that ever worked for EA games (while other games were working just fine) was running a wire from the PS2 straight into my modem, bypassing the router altogether– and having splashed out for a wireless bridge, I didn’t want to do that.
I think I’ve hit on the solution eventually, though. I chanced upon a couple of posts like this one yesterday that said some people were having to turn off UPnP support in their router to have Xbox Live games work. Since it was about the only thing I hadn’t tried, I investigated… and it turns out my router had UPnP turned on, but my DSL modem had it turned off. So I turned them both off.
Result 1: A happy evening of online car crashing. (Most of the time; there are still some players I just can’t ping, resulting in a disconnect.)
Result 2: France 2 Brazil 0. Arse. Maybe I should stick with PES after all.