Wii online soon

[A Black Falcon]

No one says that the manner in which they handled games like MKDS will be the de facto standard for Nintendo online. The DS was Nintendo's first real step into online gaming (Famicom hardly counts), and they are guaging gamers response to it.

If this were true, Nintendo would be talking about how they want to improve their online system. They haven't. Quite the opposite, they regularly go out there and defend the idiocy of forced friend codes... they must know that they're not telling the truth about those things being a competent system, but NCL makes the rules, and they're paranoid about people contacting children online or average Japanese people not wanting to play because they don't like online gaming (where the other person can insult them or whatever) or something so...

Honestly, I don't see a problem with the friend code system. If you want to play against your friends you can, or play against strangers. What more do you need? To add people to your friends list? I haven't met a single racer on MKDS online that I'd have any interest in racing again.

.
..
...

I'm trying hard to think of how I can respond to this without insults, but really, it's hard. "What more do you need"? "What more do you need"??? Ah, how about ALMOST EVERYTHING! Online gaming is so great, and Nintendo's service is so utterly incompetent, that to hear someone actually defending it is pretty depressing. Really, the only reasons with any plausibility to defend it are either because you are an utterly hopeless fan who is denying reality or because you've never played a real online game... well, either that or you're one of those people who hates online gaming, but in that case why would you care how the service is one way or the other? In the PC world such people would just ignore online gaming and stick to single player stuff, only annoyed for things like whole genres seeming to go online-only or something (like most PC RPGs for instance)...

Of course going from game to game there are always issues -- like in an MMORPG (or non-MM online RPG like Guild Wars) you'll be much more successful in a group of people you know than in a random group -- but how do you meet such groups? Yeah, almost always in the game itsself. Online gaming without the ability to contact the people you are playing with or against is pretty much pointless; why not just spend your time improving the AI instead? It's functionally the same...