16th July 2007, 4:41 PM
Quote:Anyway, I'm basically saying I am of the same opinion as Penny Arcade when it comes to online service. Live is a buffet. Others struggle to catch up. Nintendo's online service doesn't actually exist, at least on the Wii, until an online game actually comes out.
Pokemon Battle Revolution is "online". It works like a DS game, where you need to trade friends codes externally in order to be able to play. I don't know if it has random matchmaking... maybe not.
Quote:I play online games, ABF. I'd rather not count the hours I've spent blowing people away in Counter Strike Source. While your point is valid, in that Nintendo's online service isn't as varied as (to cite a personal example) Steam, it's enough for me. When I play Mario Kart, I'm not sitting there thinking "man, I sure wish I could add this guy to my friends list" or "boy, I wish I could talk into the microphone" or wow, this service is really lacking". I'm thinking "I am playing Mario Kart online".
Given how bad the service is that would not be the way I would be thinking, I know that for sure... and it shouldn't be. Excusing Nintendo for a major, continued mistake is stupid. You're completely letting them off the hook for a major problem they refuse to fix and it's ridiculous. There are so many things wrong with the service and so many absolutely essential features missing that it's impossible to "just enjoy the service". How can you feel like you're playing an online game when the other people have no actual personalities or meaning? They just feel like silent AIs who are probably a little better (or at least less consistent) than the AIs in the single player mode, nothing more and nothing less...
As for Steam I've never played an online game against others over Steam so I can't say anything about it as far as an online gaming service goes... my ideal model is of course Battle.net. Though every online gaming service I have ever used on the PC over the years (SIGS, Gamespy Arcade, MPlayer, Zone.com, Battle.net, Westwood Chat/Westwood Online, Ubisoft Gameservice versions 2 and 3, various in-game server browsers like Gamespy provides for FPSes, game-specific systems like Netstorm has, MMO/online RPG setups, etc...) is better than what Nintendo offers. Sure, most of them may not have random matchmaking (I can't remember having that in any PC games I'd played before Warcraft III, unless I'm forgetting something), but when you can actually join games at will and talk to others about the rules for this specific game that doesn't matter.
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