This all started when I happened across a post on the site Infendo. The hot topic right now is Super Smash Bros.: Brawl. Greatly anticipated Wii title not just because it's an awesome game, but it's the expansion of an awesome franchise into an online world. We haven't had much in the way of fighting games that play online anyway, which is a genre that at it's core is catered to multiple players. Many fighting games include a single player aspect as an afterthought. You'd think fighters and online would go hand in hand, but it just hasn't been happening. Nintendo's foray into online gaming hasn't gone smoothly however, and Smash Bros. online reminds me of trying to play Quake 1 over mPlayer on a 14.4 baud modem. For you kids who have only known broadband, that's nerd talk for "criminally slow."
People are asking a lot of questions, they just want things to work. So enter Infendo, trying to bring some rationality or explination to the table from an outsider's perspective:
"This has been Nintendo’s plan all along. The ironic thing about it all? It’s going to work. ... As a company that exists to make money, Nintendo has sought to remake gaming in its image. Eventually, this will include online play."
And in this statement the article stops just short of calling Nintendo the reincarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ. I've been playing with power since 1986, and I'm as big a self professed Nintendo fan as anyone. But come the fuck on. It's broken on purpose? Now you're just being ignorant.
While I can see the point the article is trying to make, this being Nintendo's first serious foray into online play and by extension their user base's first foray into online play, thus they are training their install base on the "Nintendo Way" for online. I don't think I'm buying it.
I can agree with assessments that X Box Live's users themselves are stunting the growth of X Box Live, but then that is the market Microsoft went after with their marketing. Advertising on MTV, Comedy Central, and any venue construed as popular in an attempt to transform gaming from a niche market into something that was popular culture attracted exactly those kind of loud mouth me too ignorant boarish popular people. They get on X Box Live and bark their heads off just to share the noise of their own voice with others, and derrive joy from the frustration they cause. See also the research done by John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
Personally, I feel the headset to be the single most useless "innovation" to overtake modern gaming, and I'm glad the Wii doesn't have one. Vital game information is seemingly never communicated over the headset, just "OMG HAX!1 I shot that dude!" No you didn't. Get over it. Try again later.
The problem with the Wii is it's sheer unwillingness to want to let you play online. Friend Codes on the DS weren't much of a problem to me because the WiFi Connection service launched about a year or six months after the DS came out, so I saw Friend Codes as kinda like a hack after the fact. Because Nintendo has been announcing and leaving support for future online expansion on their hardware since the NES. They never really executed on it, even on the Gamecube. So in my mind Friend Codes were introduced to make things work that were not provided by the DS, the idea being that online on the DS may or may not happen. When it did happen, we got Friend Codes.
When Friend Codes appeared again on the Wii, I saw it as them having learned their lesson from the DS, and building in support on the system level this time. When "per game" Friend Codes appeared alongside my "per system" Friend Code, that's about the time I became angry. Now there is no excuse, I already have friends in my address book who I can send mail to, but I can't play games with these friends? I can't see when these friends are playing games? Or what games they own? Or anything except "Wii mail" them?
But then to make the claim that Nintendo is doing this on purpose? That they're training their users and reshaping things in their image? Teaching them how to swim? How to swim through a river that contains no water is more like it, because Nintendo's online experience might as well not exist. The echo chamber is so vocal because the experience itself is so frustrating that the "only 20%" of people who are trying to use it are driven out of their minds. Twenty percent of of a group of people shrieking loudly is a very loud annoying amount of people, regardless of if they are in the minority.
I think it comes from an over bearing sense of needing to protect The Children™. Nintendo has always been very family orientated, lest we forget the grey sweat that came off the fighters in Mortal Kombat when the Genesis version got actual red pixels. This has always been the stereotype barked when the console forum wars break out, anything Nintendo is pejoratively crowned the Kid's Console, as if that is a bad thing. And in this online world we must see to it that they are protected, no unwanted contact with strangers, no talking lest there be a chance of a curse word slipping through the filter, no global friends lest we start getting stalked online by predators. Keep your hands to yourself at all times, make sure your seat belts are properly fashioned.
The two problems I see with this are 1) This creates an online experience I have a hard time distinguishing from offline play. Short of running a packet sniffer on my network, how can I really tell I'm playing online at all? Short of lag and matchmaking problems, I could just be playing against an AI in Brawl or Mario Kart DS. I really don't know any better, because the experience is so disconnected. 2) The Wii already has very robust Parental Controls, that can govern every other facet of the console, from the News Channel to the Store Channel. Why then is the online protection enforced with the kids gloves? Why aren't we teaching our user base how to use these tools instead, and enhancing the online experience for everyone? Rather than building a system that is purposely crippled in the name of safety.
Because at the end of the day, I don't think Nintendo knows what they're doing online. Within weeks of it's launch, Guitar Hero III had a plethora of downloadable content for both the 360, and for the PS3. And on the PS2 Sony showed us that if the game wasn't called Socom, it might as well have not had online play, and Socom's online wasn't great either. Yet on the PS3 they seem to have figured it out. Downloadable content still isn't available for the Wii version of Guitar Hero III. The news reports still say it's coming, but I'm not holding out for it. The X Box 360 lets you download the Halo theme for GH3. I can't get a Mario theme for the game. I think that speaks for itself.
I don't think there is anything intentional about it short of incompetence. Unless as the article suggests Nintendo did their homework and came to the same numbers the NPD is reporting, and decided that online anything was not worth throwing giant amounts of money toward at this time. As a company that exists to make money, that much I can agree with.
But still, more often than not, when I try to play Brawl online. I'm just riding down the road to failure.
