Nintendo's WiFi service way too restrictive

[A Black Falcon]

And they let you build walls. :)

I did play original WCII multiplayer... once I discovered Zone.com (now mainly a site for flash games and stuff, but it used to be a real online gaming site) and its IPX emulation that let you play stuff like WCII over a gaming service... but that was a while later, at least summer '97, and maybe '98 or later, when I first did that (versus buying WCII in summer '96). But yeah, actual IP-to-IP? Just once.

I can't remember if I ever played any other game via IP, ever... hmm... maybe something once or twice sometime that I can't remember... but very, very rare. The hassle of coordinating the game is a major pain... it only works under certain circumstances which for someone like me were not at all realistic.

Here? Well, Mario Kart has random racing so there's that... but coordinating to play against actual people would be as much of a pain as it always is. This is where online services really help... I mean on PC you can just also be on IM so people can contact you as long as you're online (no matter what game you're playing), but there's nothing like that on a handheld console...