You may remember on 20th April, we reported that Phantasy Star Online became a free game (I.e., the Hunters License is free) for all Japanese players across the SEGA Dreamcast versions of Version 1 & 2.
Well, recently Sonic Team of Japan have been having a few connection problems and errors are stopping people from playing online, in an official post by Sonic Team of Japan.
It seems that currently you can only connect to the Japanese servers through playing Version 2 online via. a SEGA Dreamcast Broadband Adapter, with Version 1 completely unplayable online at this time.
However, Ragol.co.uk Forumer K_I_R_E_E_K has found a post on another forum concerning the issue at onlineconsoles.com.
"A user at the JP PSO boards states that it is still possible to get online with version 1, however you need to redirect the game and resolve the IP’s yourself rather than relying on the ISP’s DNS servers.
It is imperative to note that this has NO effect on the European PAL Phantasy Star Online servers. Sega did not willingly terminate the functionality of Japanese PSO. It was a technical problem that would be fixed if possible.
Sega stated that this issue cannot be fixed on the game servers, and would need to be patched on the game disc itself."
Whether or not the problem will be fixed anytime soon is another issue, as Sonic Team programmers are probabily much more at work on PSU than PSO, but they're obviously aware of the problem so maybe sometime soon. For the meanwhile though, EU Dreamcast PSO should remain stable!
