So just this morning I was thinking... I enjoy both the Xbox Live service, as well as the method that it connects gamers. Let me explain.

My Xbox 360's DVD drive died in November, and a combination of being quite busy and not liking dealing with people over the phone, caused me to not doing anything about it until late May. I eventually ordered a replacement drive online to replace it myself. While waiting between placing the order, and it arriving, I was really getting the itch to play some Live with my best friend. I had my Xbox with me, but he only had his 360 with him, so we needed to find a game that worked with both systems which we both owned copies of. Our first choice was Halo 2, but when he couldn't find his copy, we settled on the one game that fit the requirements, Ghost Recon. This game came out on November 11, 2002, and the Live service launched on the 15th of November, so it's pretty fair to say that by the standards of the service, it's old.

So we popped the game in, and not only did it work (duh!) we weren't even the only two people looking to play a Co-op game at that time. You heard me- there were other people playing a 6 year old game at the same time we were. Had we had the PS2 versions, I doubt that the service would still be running. And this isn't a major thing, if some one asked me, "What's your favorite feature of Xbox Live" I wouldn't respond that I love how it supports old games, but sharing that experience really made my day.

The big reason that the service is able to do this is that it doesn't run dedicated servers for games, it runs servers for the features of the service. Matchmaking are run by their servers, but they set up one of the consoles as the "host" of the game and everyone connects to that box. If everyone has a bad connection it isn't fun, but all you need is one person in the game to have a good connection and then it make no performance difference.