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Releasing a little late this week, the final campaign show is making it’s debut, until Halo Recon comes out. GLewis was experiencing internet issues and wasn’t able to be on the show, but we had a nice visit from Lancelot, host of the Around the Ring podcast. This week we discuss the final two Halo 3 campaign levels. Thanks to all the submissions we got. Thanks to the person who submitted this week’s podart as he/she did not include their name.

I recently purchased a D-Link Gamerlounge DGL-4500 Xtreme N Gaming Router. In this thread I will post my thoughts about it in a somewhat realtime manner as I begin using it. It will eventually be a full review, but I’m going to write it as a stream of consciousness rather than a complete review. Read on for my experience thus far.

I just purchased it two days ago and installed it yesterday, but I still don’t have all the features configured or any experience with it during online gaming.

First, I purchased it because I run two Xbox 360s in my house, sometimes gaming at the same time, and my current router (~4 year old Belkin Wireless G router) can’t support open NAT on both. This creates interesting problems when trying to host and organize online games. Another small problem that it promises to fix is increase in ping times to your online gaming host while another network computer is uploading or downloading large amounts of data. Take a look at this pic I found on the dslreport forums.

It supposedly fixes this by prioritizing network traffic to allow gaming data through first. I don’t know how it works, but it sounds great. Perhaps I’ll learn in the coming days. It also has 802.11n (draft), but I currently don’t have any devices that support N, so that’s just some incentive for the future. It also has an LED display

The router is a little expensive at $170 delivered from Amazon. I wasn’t excited about paying this much, but my previous router lasted many years. Not only was it getting old, but it lacked several features that I want and would use regularly. I get a lot of utility from my home networking equipment through online gaming, LANs, and my home theater PC, so it was worth the $ to me to buy a quality router with lots of features, because I tend to use those features.

Last night I installed the router, upgraded the firmware, set up my wireless network, and set up MAC address filtering. My wireless security is to not broadcast my SSID plus only allow approved MAC addresses. Yes, it’s possible to find out my SSID and spoof a MAC address, but it’s not very probably–especially in light of all the open and WEP encrypted networks around me.

Upgrading the firmware was easy. Some reviews complained about it. I think the complaints are unfounded. Setting up MAC address filtering was essentially easy, but I did stumble on one nuance: make sure the first MAC address you add to the approved list is the MAC of the device you’re using, or you essentially lock yourself out of the router and must do a hard reset to default settings.

Yeah. It happened twice.

After that things went smoothly. Both Xbox 360s have open NAT and all my devices are online. It integrated seamlessly with my existing 16-port switch that services all my home network drops. However, it appears that I must reconfigure my Vista Media Center machine (HTPC) with my Media Center Extenders (Xbox 360s). Changing the router seems to have destroyed the connection, but that should be simple enough to fix. I plan to drag the HTPC out of the closet and tackle that tonight (hopefully before the debate).

GameCock, famed interrupter of awards ceremonies, holder of funerals for tradeshows, and publishers of games by Wideload such as Hail to the Chimp, have been acquired by SouthPeak.

SouthPeak published last year’s Two Worlds RPG on the PC and 360, a game that was widely criticized for failing to live up to the high standards set by Bethesda’s similar game, Oblivion.

This week, we are going to the voicemail and discovering what has been left there over the past couple of months. We are also doing Tales from the Foxhole so send in your great stories of you owning your opponents or any hilarious encounters of the unexpected. Deadline for callins to be guaranteed is Wednesday night. Deadline for tips is Sunday.