Digital Illusions and Sensible Software: Beginnings

For those of you interested in the early years of the greatest games companies of the Amiga era, check out the following youtube videos.
The first, dating from 1994, takes a look at a young Digital Illusions, and features interviews with Andreas Axelsson, Olof Gustafsson and Joakim Wejdemar. It's fantastic seeing DI when they were a small outfit- worlds apart from today's DICE. Just remember to turn on close captions/subtitles by clicking on the arrow at the bottom right of the video (just under "YouTube" - make sure you start playing the video first).

The second video features an interesting interview with Jon Hare, co-founder of Sensible Software. Sensible created many brilliant games for the C64 and Amiga, including Parallax, Sensible Soccer, SEUCK and Cannon Fodder. The interview is quite well done, and reveals how Sensible was founded by two guys on UK Govt. weekly grant of £40!

Ah the memories...

Battlefield 1943: failed to connect to EA online - solution!

If you too have been experiencing the error message failed to connect to EA online" in Battlefield 1943, don't fear- there is a solution! After many days of frustration at not being able to connect to 'EA online' to play Battlefield 1943 on my Xbox 360, I can now join online games with 100% success rate. How did I do it? Well, thanks to EA's customer support, and various internet posts, I have somehow stumbled upon the magic formula. Firstly, go to ea.com and create an account. Next, link your Xbox gamertag to the EA account (by adding a persona). This should have been simple, but somehow I entered an infinite loop of adding my persona, receiving an email from EA, clicking to confirm, and then entering my persona again. Repeat ad infinitum. Emailing EA solved the problem, with a friendly customer service representative manually linking my gamertag to my EA account. OK, still with me? If this hasn't solved your problem, then the next and final step is to download the Fight Night 4 demo. Yes, that's right, you need to download a demo for a totally unrelated game just so you can play Battlefield 1943. No point in arguing, as it's the only way I managed to solve my connection problem. Download the demo, skip the training, and then try and connect to EA via the game interface. Once you have accepted all the relevant disclaimers and managed to get online, exit the game and load up Battlefield 1943. Surprise, surprise, it now works! Good 'ol EA. You know, I never had this trouble playing COD4 online...

If this has been of assistance to you, please leave a comment. Oh, and feel free to click on one of my sponsor's messages... the GTI is gonna need new tyres real soon! ;)

PS. I should mention that during this process I also tried the 'change your Xbox 360 clock to 2005' trick as suggested by EA- it didn't make any difference for me at all.