When I originally noticed that flub in the April 2019 Xbox Live Games With Gold video saying that online game play modes were available for Star Wars BattleFront 2, an original Xbox game, I made the comment that “there is no way to play Original Xbox games online.”
That’s not entirely correct, but for the context of the mistake made in the video and the idea implied, it was an accurate statement – there is no official way to play the games online, as Xbox Live was shut down on April 15th, 2010.
There are however third party ways to somewhat re-create this, but they aren’t the same – not by a long shot. Let me explain.
While there are a few options available, we’ll focus on XLink Kai, as it’s the most prominent one. You will have seen me in the two articles regarding that flub mention the service and briefly explain it.
Xlink Kai is a 3rd party service which allows one to, in short, simulate a local area connection over the internet, thus allowing “system link” functions on Xbox games which have such modes to be playable over the internet, as if everyone was in the same room.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XLink_Kai
This involves a process of port forwarding on your router so that the software which you must run on your computer can actually communicate and bridge the connection between your Xbox and the service itself. If, and only if, all that wants to work correctly and you have a system link capable game, only then will you be able to properly play those system link modes online.
What it does not allow is access to any variation of the Xbox live service or features and game play modes which existed only on that service. Selecting Xbox Live will still take you to the sign in screen, where if you don’t have an account saved on that Xbox you will be prompted to make one, and if you do you will be asked to sign in – both of which will still not happen as the servers for that version of Xbox Live no longer exist. If Xlink Kai was an Xbox Live replacement, such wouldn’t happen, now would it?
This distinction should be obvious, but it doesn’t seem to be to many people – some, if you follow my twitter thread on the subject, wanted to insist that since Xlink Kai allows you to play local area game play modes across the internet this somehow counts as Online play in the context of “Xbox Live.”
No. It’s not. Xlink Kai is not and never will be the same as Xbox Live. Period.
I stopped wishing to replay once he reached the point of changing statement meanings to fit his own end tactic.
I don’t understand why this needs to be explained, but it does – as mentioned above, the service allows, for the Xbox Console anyway, the ability to play games via System Link over the net. Of interesting note, this means Halo: Combat Evolved can be played over the net in this way, even though it had no Xbox Live support whatsoever.
For comparison, take a version of MotoGP shown in the below video — it requires Xbox Live to sign in by default, and as such can never be played over Xlink Kai – why? Because it’s not a system link game. That’s all Xlink Kai is — a way to span system link games over the internet.
While yes, there are a great many games which will work with the service (if you can actually get it all set up without issue — I had a poor time even trying it when I wanted to a few years ago) then sure, you can play some things online, but it isn’t the same. It’s not the actual Xbox Live service as it was (shown in the above video) nor will it ever be anything more than system link spanned over the internet.
Why does this matter to me? Because I hate when people say things are what they are not. Treat it like what it is, not what you want it to be. Admit where it has limits, and focus on where it does work. Most of all, acknowledge point blank that it is not an Xbox Live drop in replacement – that it is something different.
Lastly, don’t use terrible logic to try to claim that it somehow wasn’t wrong of Microsoft to have said in that video that BattleFront 2 was playable online when it isn’t under any conventional or supported means – context is everything and anyone with a bit of common sense would know that Xlink Kai was not being referred to in that clip.
https://www.teamxlink.co.uk/ Note that even their website stressed “System Link Games.” It should also be noted how relatively dead the service seems on a whole…. but I can’t directly comment on that here, nor does it really matter to the points being made.