[corduroyboy]

I cannot condemn Nintendo's handling of online gaming enough.

Now don't get me wrong, I think that Nintendo are doing great things promoting online gaming, and offering free connection to Nintendo Wi-Fi providing you have broadband and a wireless adaptor set up correctly BUT the way that Mario Kart DS, and now Animal Crossing handle joining/playing online are really flawed.

In Mario Kart, you'd be as well playing against randomly named bots, because you get no interaction with them whatsoever, which makes it kind of pointless. It is nice to have a bit of a chat between races, or post-race, as otherwise, it doesn't feel like racing other people, which is the point in the first place of playing online. No choice (other than worldwide, continental, blah blah blah) as to what type of race or anything either, it'd be much better to be able to join certain races, or types of race.

In Animal Crossing, I appreciate that they are trying to prevent the exploitation of children, or whatever, but I find that having paid 29.99 for a title, and wanting to randomly visit a person online, or select from a list of towns currently "online" would be much better. I mean, the message in a bottle thing is cute, but in the UK it's doubtful I'll ever be within 30m of someone else playing at the same time, it'd be so nice to be able to send a message in a bottle over wi-fi, or to wake up one morning and discover some bottles on the beach from random people all over the world. As a boy of 24, I find it extremely limiting the restrictions Nintendo have put on their online games.

It is not their responsibility to nanny children, they should be well enough educated about the risks of the internet by their parents. If Nintendo insist on handling online gaming with such kid-gloves, why not just put on a "parental lock" feature so that the parent can lock the online functions to what they currently are (needing friendcodes) with a PIN (bloody hell, even a signature with the stylus) required to unlock it. If it is unlocked it can act as I propose, being able to visit wherever is online whenever you like. It defeats the entire purpose if I have to know the people beforehand, even partially (ie through here or a friendcode forum)..

I guess I just want to wake up to loads of random message bottles on the beach every morning and the bittersweetness of not being able to reply to the person or even know who they are, unless they've included their email address or something..

This would be lovely, but it is an impossible dream unless Nintendo intend on releasing a version with better online functionality, which is probably never going to happen, or an Animal Crossing 2.

I'm just pissed at a beautiful opportunity wasted.

Online play is great and playing online with friends is fun, but I can already do that locally. I want to play strangers, I want to meet new people, I don't want to be so restricted...

Friendcodes are a good idea for tracking which of your buddies are online, and getting to play with them as well, but man.....