Wii goes online with Gamespy

[Scav]

<a href="http://www.gonintendo.com">Go Nintendo</a> linked a press release today concerning the Wii’s online developments. Nintendo will be partnering with Gamespy for its online play — a move that mirrors their relationship with the DS. The features this partnership will provide are said to be similar to what the DS offers in games like Mario Kart DS and Animal Crossing.

Will this release us from the shackles of friend codes? Probably not, but at the least it might make managing them easier. Nobody is looking forward to separate friend codes in every game, so a cohesive system provided by Gamespy would help dramatically.

What implications do you think this has for Smash Bros Brawl? I’m not familiar with DS online functionality, so I don’t know if it’s been improved to a level where we would be happy to see it in the game.

You can read the press release <a href="http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&amp;newsId=2007031300539 7&amp;newsLang=en">here</a>

[guynamednate]

I’ve played a lot of DS online (mostly Mario Kart and Tetris) and have to say that it is OK at best. My main gripe with it is that it is extremely slow to find opponents and to connect, there is no way to quickly hop in a game like on Xbox Live (expect to wait 2-3 minutes each time you want to play a game online). Second, there is literally NO interaction with the other players, outside the scope of the game (i.e. no lobbies, no chatting, no profiles or anything like that). Third, the only stat tracking I’ve seen is a wins/losses count which can be reset at any time by the player (lame). Finally, DS has no out-of-game online information, so you can’t see which of your friends are currently using their DS or have any way of inviting them to a game short of calling them up on the phone.

All in all, I hope the Wii improves drastically on the DS model and I hope Smash Bros takes advantage of it.

[UndrDog]

Yeah finding opponents can suck. But I doubt games like Brawl will ever run into that issue.

[Maximum]

Is online play on Brawl really that Necessary? Melee didn’t have one, so why should Brawl need one?

[Mic_128]

Maximum: Here’s a better question: “Why not?”

[Scav]

That’s not really better :p the reasons “why not” are “It can cause delays,” “it might be too laggy to be worth it,” “if matchmaking is poor, it might be about as used as Melee’s tournament feature…”

Reasons for? If done right, it’s a strong step to getting Smash a community of halo-proportions.

[Xsyven]

Online play would boost sales out of the roof. Along with what Scav was saying, imagine Halo 2 without online play. It’d still fun, but it’d be more of an underground game, like SSBM is now.

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[Aaron]

thats what the ****ing headings called *******. another dumb**** said the same ****

[Johnknight1]

Online unites the fanbase, and increases sales. Look at Halo 2, Brawl could be like that (hopefully with less scrubs). Hopefully Gamespy does it right in terms of online! However, I’ll usually only play nearby.

[Someone]

Wouldn’t it be great if Nintendo occasionly ran online tournaments in which you win 500 wii points as a promotional event. A little far fetched, but it’d still be great.