Recently I, and more particularly Heather, have been enjoying the delights of Bomberclone, a clone of the classic Bomberman game. To be honest, it’s a great little game, with cool graphics, and funny sound effects. And it’s addictive as hell. To that end I thought that it would be an excellent opportunity for some husband/wife/machine bonding through the use of bomberclone network play. How wrong could I be 
To quote the manual:
If you are behind a firewall or a router and you expire some diffcults within the game with more as two players. You may enable the Firewall option. With this Option set on you are only able to join a game.
To paraphrase – if you’re behind a firewall, it ain’t gonna work. In fact, as far as I could see, it ain’t gonna work at all. The reason being that network play involves, from what I can tell, contacting their master server. Now – we could manage to connect and join to a game served on our local network, but couldn’t actually play. They’re welcome to correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the issue is that I don’t want port 11000 open to the whole internet (I don’t want any ports open to the whole internet, if I can help it).
Who, in this day and age, runs a computer on the internet without a firewall? (Actually, judging by some of the stats, quite a lot of people, but that doesn’t stop it from being a really stupid idea) So why, oh why, oh why, would such a quality game with a working network component, not allow itself to run properly on a local network behind a firewall. A connection to some sort of game server might be great for an online multiplayer game, or for a proprietary company to protect its assets, but I expected more from a piece of free software that, lets be honest, is niche enough that few people are going to play it online on a regular basis……
No need.
mrBen