WiiConnect24 Pros and Cons
The Wii is great for playing with friends and family in real life, but will it ever be good for playing across an internet connection? Will WiiConnect24 take off soon? I'm not talking about being able to check the weather, download a retro game or vote for your favorite Holiday, I'm talking about online multiplayer.
There are some pros and cons about the Wii's friend code system. Gamers hope that Nintendo will ensure that all games are attached to the same friend code, for ease and to allow you to send cross-game invites. If the Wii will have the fluidity of Xbox's Gamertags with the natural consequences associated with friend codes, it would be a sure success.
What are these natural friend code consequences that I am speaking of? Let me put it this way, on the Xbox, any person with some money to spare can get online, find a game and be a jerk to all the people and then do it again and again. With the Friend Code system, you'd only be playing with people you want to play with, largely only with people you know in real life or maybe you saw their friend code on a gaming forum. If someone is mean... well, they won't have anyone to play with.
But what if there is rarely anyone to play with, even for non-jerks? The beauty of Xbox LIVE was that you could always eventually find a game through a service called "Optimatch" which matched you up with random players based on the criteria you select. Now, it's the time for finding people to play with somehow and entering long, unwieldly friend codes.
Of course, the Wii is largely popular, but I doubt that everyone who bought the Wii got it with the intention of playing online. I believe that because WiiConnect24 is free, if game manuals contain information on online play inside them (like tips on strategizing with your teammates), people would have to at least check it out.
What about GAMES? Well, a game I am getting excited about is Battalion Wars 2. I don't know a whole lot about it except for what it says on the Nintendo Wii page, including the fact that it says "Online Play" in the features. Below is a screenshot. (No, I do not have a copy of an unreleased game I found it on the Internet silly goose.)
Another game I would like to see have online multiplayer is Metriod Prime 3, but online multiplayer is not mentioned in the description of it. It was originally going to be launched with the Wii, and the release has been delayed. Because the Metroid game for the handheld Nintendo DS has online capability, we can hope that the delay is for online multiplayer capability!
I'm not sure if there are any sketchy things that would make me not want to get the game even for single player, but either way, the more online-capable games, the better! Eventually non-online games will have to compete with games that have online capability, which will hopefully lead to more online multiplayer games.
The social aspect of the Wii is what draws a lot of people into it, and hopefully there can be this same social aspect over online play.
3 comments:
it's hard to say what nintendo is planning for wii's online system. at least we know they've laid the foundation for it. But I like what you were talking about with the way jerks won't have anyone to play with. It's interesting, this reminds me of nextel phones. they are actually crippled regular phones because of forced simplex conversation, but that is actually a feature for people who need to be able to easily talk to people around them and people on the phone back and forth. Same thing for DS online and hopefully wii online: a crippled system is actually a feature.
wii bowling online would be awesome
I wonder what exactly this forced simplex conversation is, I might have to look it up somewhere!
I heard a rumor that Nintendo has copyrighted something that turns speech into text with the color of the text representing the emotion of the speaker. I wonder if that is actually true, but I also wonder if it would be rather cumbersome as some words might get bleeped for sounding like cuss words. Like you couldn't say "I am the sofa king!"
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