I'm tired of Nintendo catering to Local Wireless

**9ball** · 07-21-10, 11:42 AM

I've played a good share of games on the DS, and I really love those that let me get on the internet and play. The best games I have played with this feature are Yugioh2010 and Phantasy Star 0, both brilliant games with lobby systems that allow me to easily find people to play with on the internet. Very few Nintendo DS games actually make meaningful use of this feature unfortunately.

Dragon quest IX for example. I don't like it. It's a normal Dragon Quest game like you'd expect from SquareEnix, but the game is brutally handicapped in that it is 100% designed with local wireless in mind. More Experience, More items, Exclusive chests that can only be opened by other people when they visit your game world, all of this and more if you have the friends/the city to play in where you can reliably find people. You also get a bonus for walking by people with a DS in a special idling mode while you have you DS on.

However, this can only be relied on in Japan. In the US, this kind of local multiplayer is very hard to organize and play, and the chance you are going to cross paths with someone with their DS as well as having that DS ON is very slim even in the most populated cities.

It's not that I fault Nintendo for trying to do something innovative, but I fail to see why at least the 4 player multiplayer functionality could not have been /online/ as well as local. What I DO fault Nintendo for is stacking the deck in Local Wireless's favor so that anyone playing alone are gimped and robbed out of a wonderful multiplayer experience

I blame TWEWY.

**WaterDumple** · 07-21-10, 04:20 PM

The problem is that the DS is fully capable of going online; it doesn't need to be hindered by local wireless. Yet very few games take advantage of the online capabilities, Advance Wars: Days of Ruin being one of the only ones to do so. Of course, even then, the game doesn't have enough options. Hopefully the 3DS and its games in general will put far more effort towards making the online usable, but after the way the DS did things, it's not particularly likely.