I never really liked the old-fashioned method of dialling. I don’t think anybody did. It seems like such a long time ago now, but there once was a time when myself and everybody else in the world spent their days painstakingly rotating a numbered wheel in order to spell out their desired phone number. It was a chore. How we now laugh at our antiquated solution in the present days of button prodding. How quaint it was. We only really did it because it was necessary, and because we never knew any other way. An unwanted implementation we were happy to throw away at the first opportunity. I suppose you can see why using Nintendo’s Friend Code system reminds me of my parent’s old telephone.

We won’t waste too much time here covering our dissatisfaction of Nintendo’s unwieldy multiplayer ID system. Suffice to say, we reckon that the most we can expect from gamers is tolerance rather than understanding at entering a huge string of numbers in order to protect them from hordes of predators, griefers, trash-talkers, and annoying 14-year old kids.

We’re tired, however, of 360, PS3 and PC racing ahead while Nintendo lump us in third place for our own safety. Both Super Mario Kart and Super Smash Brothers Brawl are just around the corner. They both have potential to be phenomenal. They both have confirmed multiplayer. And while we can’t see the restrictions putting the committed off (see Pokemon DS for evidence of that), it’s going to disgruntle a lot more people than it does now.

Of course, it hasn’t helped that Nintendo’s promised online revolution never actually shifted into gear. The only real big name release so far has been the above average football game, Mario Strikers Charged Football, and that hardly set the internet alight. Virtual Console, too, has had nothing in the way of online multiplayer yet. We thought that Nintendo would really get into from launch and go head to head against their competitors in their own inimitable style. Proves how optimistically foolish we were.

Yet, one of the partly unspoken reasons we think they’ve never truly invested in online play is because they’ve always had that image of togetherness. Think four joypad ports. Nintendo want to be seen as the console where friends and family gather safely in one room in order to play with and against each other, as the majority of their adverts will testify, and not anonymously halfway across the world. We like to speculate half-heartedly that anything that ventures outside those confines is done with reluctance, Pokemon permitting, naturally. We’re probably perfectly wrong, of course – Nintendo could be sweating over how to build a first-party Halo-beating online FPS. It remains to be seen how the future will pan out for multiplayer. One of the things Wii watchers have been tightly hoping for, for instance, is that the recently trademarked name Wii Handle manifests into something similar to the 360’s Gamertag (as opposed to, say, a handle).

Still, things aren’t too gloomy. The future holds 32-player online Medal of Honor, as one improvement to current conditions at least - some slight compensation there (we think). Whether Nintendo will take the additional risk and remove the limitations and inconveniences from their friend code system to get the most out of it is another matter. They need to get over these preconceived notions of danger at every turn, or at least find a better way to handle it. Suggestions for meeting them halfway, please.

Bookmark It

This entry was posted on Friday, September 21st, 2007 at 3:27 am by James Lyon
Uncategorized.