XBAND - Gaming

Gaming

Due to the limits of dial-up, many of the games were high in latency, and the company only improved this based on the demand of the games. For example, in January 1996, Mortal Kombat 3 for the SNES was nearly unplayable, due to the complexity and speed of the game. Although the game's playability improved over time, it still retained a large number of exploitable glitches. Simpler games such as Super Mario Kart or NBA Jam rarely experienced such trouble. The Sega Genesis counterpart was often regarded as being much simpler and had far fewer complaints about synchronization problems with its games.

When connecting to play, unless a player specified a particular user from their friend list, players would be matched with a random player elsewhere in the country (or the player's local area code depending on their preference settings) who was also connecting to play the same game. When the network matched two players up, one player's telephone would ring once and the XBAND modem would answer. At that point the players would see the XBAND logo slide together, followed by the matchup screen, which displayed each player's codenames, avatars, locations, and a pre-typed "taunt".