[eddieroger]

I'm not sure why we're surprised to see functionality disappear from online-tethered services when it's been happening in other arenas for years now - most visibly, online gaming. The oldest example I can come up with offhand (because it's the Dreamcast's birthday) is Phantasy Star Online. That game was fun, but really only as fun as it could be played online, and the servers have been off for a long time now. EA has started turning off servers for old games in the same way. This shutdown is a shame, but hardly unexpected, especially given how niche Little Printer was.

[Igglyboo]

PSO was playable just fine offline and split-screen however. And if anyone is interested SCHTSERV[1] is a PSO private server that is still up. They have gamecube, dreamcast, and PC clients.

[1] http://www.schtserv.com/

[techdragon]

Thanks!, I've got both gamecube and dreamcast with PSO and always wanted to be able to play them online for the full experience but didn't own them early enough to do so.

[GotAnyMegadeth]

Sickeningly me and a few friends each played the Game Cube incarnation of PSO I & II for over 100 hours offline

[Igglyboo]

Yea I've been there, the local co-op was a ton of fun really. The only downside was that the framerate drops a bit if you have more than 3(2?) players.