xbox live question

[Lesley]

Hi. My son has signed up for a 1 month live free gold trial and everything seemed to go fine until he tried to join a game. He attempted to join both Gears of War and Call of Duty 3. He either got a message saying there were no games available or the search screen kept cycling but no games came up. He connected to Live no problem at all so I'm guessing that it's not a port forwarding issue. Any suggestions? I just can't believe that there's not one single game running anywhere out there. The 360 acquired an IP no problem at all if that matters. My router is a linksys wrt54g. One thing I thought was rather odd is that all the networking instructions seem to want us to connect the 360 to a PC and have ICS manage the connection.

Also is there a place online you can go to see what games are currently running? Not through the console - through the PC.

[beyj8965]

can he download stuff off of xbox marketplace.when i try to play burnout online it tells me the ea server in offline and this game cannot be played at this time.if i keep trying to connect it will dissconnect me and if i reconect it works and i can play online.it did this for pgr3 as well.if you're patient and keep trying to connect it might work.

[Lesley]

He didn't try downloading anything - he was new to live at the time. I ended up calling live support and the only thing they could come up with was to power down and unplug the 360 for ten minutes, power it up and try again. It worked. They really had no idea what was causing the problem but the solution worked. It makes sense, like Windows it's an MS product and 90% windows issues can be readily solved with a reboot. Go figure.

Thanks for the reply.

[compygeek]

There are ports that should be forwarded for XBOX LIVE to perform properly. You can check www.portforward.com for the ports, but i believe its port 88 and 3074 for both UDP and TCP transmissions. Hope this helps. I have heard that some of the one month trials clearly state on the packaging that it does not allow access to multiplayer games, so check the packaging that you got it from. I know that games that come with XBL trials are for 48-hour multiplayer gaming. Not sure what the 1 month offers.

haha...welll scrap this post considering you're live is up and running!!!!

[Lesley]

I had already forwarded the ports, that didn't solve the issue either. It was just a fluke I think. He's able to play the games he wants online now without any issues.

Thanks