nintendo wi-fi: it's no xbox live
Gloria gave me a lift to work today, which was really pretty awesome of her. I got to work about two hours before I would have, taking the ten o’clock bus. What’s more, when I got home, she gave me a copy of Tetris DS. It’s a pretty great Tetris. It’s full of crazy Nintendo references, has a bunch of good play modes, and is generally pretty cool. I mean, it’s a Nintendo-branded Tetris on a portable Nintendo system. Duh!
It’s my first Internet-enabled DS game, and I’ve played a few games online now, both against friends and against randomly chosen opponants. It was cool to be able to just tap a few buttons and play against other humans (although I had to drop my Airport out of g-only mode), but as vh commented on #perl, it’s pretty impersonal. There’s no lobby, no chat, no anything but gameplay. If every game had access to Pictochat and a lobby, it would be a huge improvement. It would be great to stop between games and say “gg” and “new mode?” and things like that.
The “friend codes” are pretty lame compared to real handles, too. I’m not sure whether they’re per game or per identity yet, but I think they’ll be per-game.
I really wish that Nintendo had put together a better showing for their online service; from what I’ve seen of Wii’s online service, it will be more like the DS service than like Live. What a bummer! Live is pretty fantastic.