Wii online soon

[A Black Falcon]

I completely agree, but we're talking about a platform that doesn't have any integration for the things that PC's do, or readily available tools to make them. It has to be built from the ground up for Wii. PC games can slap on a patch from pre-fab tools with little effort and dont have to worry about making up cost. For Nintendo, someone has to sit and make it, fully integrate it, R&D, the whole nine, and then make up for the cost of it when its released. A one time fee of say 1000 wii points to download a instant messaging service for Wii would do the trick. But there's no existing tool set for developers to dip in to in order to build one. ergo, MS made a subscription service with fully integrated IM and voice chat with tools for devs to build their online functionality.

Wait a minuite... so you're saying that consoles doing the same things PCs are doing have higher costs? That doesn't make much sense... MS is charging for Live Gold because they want money, not because they really have to.

Sure, they would need to make the tools, but the same was true for any PC game's online infrastructure, or AIM, or whatever... they make money by selling copies of the games that use the online interface; for stuff like messenging, it should just be free, but I guess a one-time charge could work too (like the web browser)... anyway, those are all solvable problems. Nintendo just doesn't want to solve them.

Who would you say is best?

The basic online gaming system involves some form of lobby system where the players chat before entering games and playing. These include both open chatrooms and user-creatable ones, for clans/guilds to use or for people to use with friends.

For game options, random-play is the default one, with various settings so you can configure what kind of game to play -- your player selection (race in an RTS, vehicle for a racing game, whatever), preferred maps, etc.

Second, custom modes where players can create games people can join; these can be locked so only friends can see them (it would show what friends are doing somewhere so you'd know a friend is interested in playing a game -- just "random friendslist play" isn't good enough, having control over who joins would be nice too, even if usually it wouldn't matter unless you have a bunch of people on the list), or they could be open so that you can get a game with specific settings and the game creator can choose who gets to play (WCIII Custom mode, any game in any online game from before Random modes were implemented, etc). The more user-customization features (map editor, etc) the game has, the more important Custom mode style stuff is, but even without much of that it still has uses...

Now, that's just a basic layout; you can do things differently too -- see stuff like DOA3/DOAXBV on X360 which have a graphical lobby where a group of players can watch the ones currently playing, like in an arcade, or NetStorm, with its graphical interface for the "lobby" instead of just a screen full of text menus and buttons and stuff...

Of course, this isn't getting into online-only games or MMOs, but if those come to Wii they will follow the same rules they do anywhere, as the quote up there from Square shows -- they won't bring MMOs to Wii as long as Nintendo refuses to let them have control over the system. Of course, I'd imagine that HDD stuff is also a barrier for such games, as FFXI installs itsself on PC, PS2, and X360 so I can't quite see how it'd work on the Wii where all you have is 512MB and those SD cards that are small in size, so there are more problems than just that, but still...

I've never heard that before, but it makes perfect sense for something the Japanese would want.

NCL people said that at some point when explaining the DS online system...

My line of thinking is that we'll eventually get there. To have the option of it if you want it or meet age requirement. Nintendo just needs to figure out how its going to be implemented.

Hopefully, but I'm not holding my breath.