Sega's game servers drop the ball

Over the past few days, PlayStation 2 gamers attempting to play ESPN College Hoops online have been having problems getting onto the basketball court. According to reports, a server problem at Sega locked out players attempting to connect or kicked them out of the lobbies within minutes. Other players simply received an error message.

After being tipped off, GameSpot replicated the error with both ESPN College Hoops and ESPN NBA Basketball. When asked to investigate, a spokesperson for Visual Concepts, Hoops' developer, confirmed the problem. "There is a server side problem," said the spokesperson. "We anticipate servers going up sometime [Wednesday]. We're on the case, on the problem."

While PS2 Hoops players have been venting their frustration in game forums for days, players of the Xbox edition, hosted on Microsoft's Xbox Live servers, have encountered no problems so far.