Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Our faces lit up this morning after seeing this image on Famitsu's site. Surely, this was it: Nintendo's long-awaited solution to the storage woes of every Wii-owning geek and otaku on the planet. Alas, no. After scrambling for a machine translation of the accompanying kanji, our hopes were emphatically mangled. This is no HDD unit, but a portable air conditioner the "Nintendo WiFi Network Adapter." Once again, life had thrown us a cruel curveball. Happy Monday morning, us.

Anyway, if you struggle to get your Wii or DS online (and we know from experience that it can be fiddly), then this dinky wireless LAN router is for you. It can be used with the Wii, the DS, your PC, and other devices, and will be available on Nintendo's Japanese homepage from September 18th, priced at ¥5,800 (US$53). There's no news yet on a launch outside Japan, though as the Nintendo WiFi USB Connector was discontinued late last year, a western release would be a safe bet.

Hit the break for three more images, one of which depicts the adapter's three modes: "Router," "Bridge" (for connecting to your Wii or DS via another router), and "Auto" (which automatically switches your network). As for our ongoing storage issues, we're still waiting, Shiggy/Reggie/Satoru ...

Those of you who booted up the Wii this morning and checked out the Mario Kart Channel may have noticed that the first competition has finally been opened for entry! The process is simple: complete three laps of Mario Circuit as quickly as possible, upload your time to Nintendo's big list 'o times, wait until the deadline (May 9th or May 10th, depending on your timezone), and get ready to bask in internet glory. Hurray, right?

Wrong.

When we think of Mario Kart time trials, we think of gradually shaving milliseconds off of our best times, of taking every corner as finely as possible, of finding the best way to utilize our three mushrooms, of locating the perfect racing line, and of keeping our noses just ahead of the time trial ghosts. Yet this first Mario Kart Wii competition totally misses the point.

For instance, it's not a time trial at all, but a fully fledged race, complete with eleven opponents and all the usual items. In other words, you can take every corner as flawlessly as possible, only to get blue-shelled on the final straight. Which doesn't strike us as a terribly fair contest. We guess this is meant to level the playing field for newer players, but shouldn't more skillful players be justly rewarded?

Anyway, if you do want to try your hand at being robbed of a deserved victory, this blogger's best time so far is a quite appalling 2:03.325.

We've known about Brawl's online mode for a while now, but today's dojo update takes a closer look at the nuts and bolts of how it all works when playing with friends (you may recall that you can play with non-friends, but their name won't be visible). And boy, does it look simple.

The first thing you'll need to do, as you'd expect, is swap Friend Codes. Yes, they're a royal pain in everybody's backside, but let's face facts: due to Nintendo's "safety first" approach, they're here to stay. Once Friend Codes have been entered into your Wii, they stay there forever, allowing you to view the status of your Brawl buddies. From there, if you fancy some fisticuffs, it's simply a matter of somebody hosting the game, and the rest of your pals piling in. Piece of cake, eh?

No, not that kind of corruption, but rather the corruption of data. See, we're pretty big Virtual Console junkies around here. As such, we're constantly moving games from our Wii's built-in memory to our SD card, but recently we started noticing our SD card had a lot of corrupted data on it. Trying to copy the data over to our Wii doesn't work and we're left with the chore of downloading all of these corrupted games again.

What bugs us, though, is that the possibility of other games being corrupted is so high on the charts that re-downloading these games seems like a futile effort. So, what are we supposed to do? Wait until we feel like playing them and then decide to download them, right then and there? Sadly, yes ...

Any of you run into this problem? Has the data been corrupted on the Wii itself?

Nintendo fans have been gnashing their teeth and chewing their nails over this one for months, but now we can all relax and release that long-held breath: Super Smash Bros. Brawl is going to take the fight online. And we're not talking about lesser online features, either, but head-to-head matches with your friends or with anyone in the world. The dojo promises other online features as well, but this is the big deal and thus was revealed first.

Of course, because this is Nintendo, there are some inherent protections within the non-friends play. When you choose to play with "anyone," you will not see your opponent's name, and there will be no records kept of your victories (or your painful losses). But at least you can play, so we're not going to complain. This latest update also cautions that online play across continents may be slower than a match with someone relatively close by. In the end, most of the focus seems to be on friends-only play, but that was to be expected, and we're frankly excited that the "play with anyone" feature was added at all.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

Being the only release this week, Mario Strikers Charged is undoubtedly a game that has emerged on your radar, bleeping and blooping in the most loud of ways. We were wondering, though, how many of you picked the game up, or intend to? Does the gameplay look fun to you, or are you simply looking for something to play online that isn't Pokemon?

We like online gaming as much as the next set of obsessive gamers; in fact, we even brave the friend code system on the DS every week, like clockwork, just to throwdown via the WiFi network. But just because we like it -- and sometimes prefer it -- does that mean that every game with available multiplayer needs to have online multiplayer? For that matter, does every game even need a multiplayer mode? Obviously, we're thinking here about the recent confirmation that Metroid Prime 3 will have no online multiplayer, but it applies to a lot of things. Let's take Wii Sports, for example. Tons of fun! Could in fact be online! But does it need to be? The philosophy behind Wii Sports seems to be that playing with others -- in person -- is fun. Isn't the philosophy behind the Metroid series pretty centered on the themes of loneliness and isolation, as well as exploration? With games like Saint's Row and Halo on the Xbox, online multiplayer makes perfect sense. Whether we want it or not aside ... is it really right for Metroid?

We'll definitely come on board and say that we hope that the Wii boasts many online games by the time its cycle ends. We particularly hope for at least one or two great FPS games with online multiplayer, but perhaps that's a dream. Still, is it worth hoping for online multiplayer when it runs counter to the central idea behind a franchise or game ... and worse yet, should we be hoping for multiplayer from a team who has yet to show us that they can even manage decent local multiplayer, much less online?

Sure, online modes add replayability, and that's always nice. But if that's all we need in a game, should Nintendo start tacking online multiplayer onto Zelda games, for instance?

Sure, we wouldn't take the Soup Nazi's claim that Samus' latest jaunt will not include Wi-Fi multiplayer as truth, but when Michael Kelbeugh, the main man over at Retro Studios, says so, then we kind of take it as fact. And, that's exactly what he said in an interview with GamePro recently, dashing hopes here at Wii Fanboy Estates that the small delay the game has received was so that online multiplayer could be tweaked.

So, why no online multiplayer in a game that is begging for it? Mikey K. (it's alright, we're BFF) says it's so the single-player campaign can be the best it can be, stating "It's something we talked about early on, but we only have so many resources. We opted to devote those resources to making a better single-player experience." We're sure the single-player portion of the game will rock our socks right off our feet, neatly fold them and place them in our top dresser drawer, but we don't think it'll be so good we'll be thanking Retro for not including online multiplayer.

[Via Joystiq]

With the release of Pokemon Battle Revolution this week, which you all know launches Nintendo's Wi-Fi service for the Wii, Nintendo's official site for all things Nintendo Wi-Fi Connect related has updated and ... there isn't that much there right now. We're sure a lot of it is just placeholder images and whatnot, but you'll definitely want to bookmark the site for future updates as more games utilizing the service are released.

[Thanks, Ali!]

If you have a website, you may have wondered just what you might need to do to make it Wii-friendly. Luckily, there's a great guide on Opera for the Wii available at the Opera Development Community that goes into all the ins and outs of just what the Wii's browser can do, and plenty of tips to make browsing from the sofa a little easier. The in-depth guide even looks at the smallest of details, such as what is and isn't available in the onscreen keyboard, and what kind of addresses and forms are workable on the console. For anyone looking to make the web a little more Wii-friendly, this is the place to go.

Joystiq has a scan of the European manual for Mario Strikers: Charged, sent in by reader Joshua Marketis, that documents what could potentially become quite the pain in the backside for those of you trying to take the game online when it releases. According to the scan "you will be able to play only with people within Europe" unless you have the friend code of said opponent outside of your region, citing that the reason behind this choice is due to concerns over lag.

When is Nintendo going to get a clue about online gameplay? This kind of thing isn't going to cut it and surely doesn't necessarily even improve the chances that a gamer will not receive lag. We can't be the only ones thinking this, right?

Don't get too excited, though -- they're talking about games that will follow Goddess of Dawn, which is already out in Japan. Still, from the way several of the franchise's producers talked about online content, it seems that fans of the series have a lot to look forward to in the next installment, like downloadable maps and possible online multiplayer. Now if only we knew when we might be able to expect that next game. For that matter, it would be nice to know when we might see a localization of Goddess of Dawn.

Apparently, they hoped to add some online functionality to Goddess of Dawn, but there just wasn't time. Nintendo's Hitoshi Yamagami also said something that may answer some of our questions about a lot of the earliest Wii titles; according to him, it was pretty late in the game before developers even knew what would be included with the Wii, controller-wise. While it makes us wonder if maybe things were a little rushed -- after all, we've heard versions of that before -- it also gives us hope for all the possibilities that will open up as developers become more and more comfortable with the Wii.

Reuters has tossed their hat into the online argument arena, citing concerns many of us share in regards to the Wii and online gameplay. Mainly, the concern of when are we going to get to play our Wii online? And, in attempting to tackle the subject, they instead fall face first into the mud. What we found interesting about the piece was a little factoid that the article's author Kemp Powers tossed in.

He says that "more than 50 percent of Wii consoles in the United States are connected online." Of course, that means near 50 percent (as in just over) of these consoles are connected online, but can that be correct? That's a pretty big chunk of Wii owners out there and, frankly, it makes us that much more angry that Nintendo has yet to get us online and playing each other. It's really kind of embarrassing, if you think about it. But then again, that's not Nintendo's main focus, and we knew that going in.

Still stings though, doesn't it?