It's official, DS is going online!

[Aylmer]

I got back into to town to find the Nintendo Power rag in my mailbox. There is an article about how Nintendo has teamed up with GameSpy to create a wireless multiplayer network. The network will be global, and, best of all, it will be FREE! Well, almost. You will need access to a WiFi hotspot. The first worldwide wireless title will be Animal Crossing, and you'll be able to visit other villages at any time. Also in the pipeline, due in Q4 of 2005, is Age of Empires 2: The Age of Kings. There will be WiFi support for up to four players. Castlevania DS will allow you to trade Tactical Souls with other players. What has me jazzed though is Shogun Warriors, a wireless RTS with support for up to 16 players via WiFi.

[Gadfly2317]

I got back into to town to find the Nintendo Power rag in my mailbox. There is an article about how Nintendo has teamed up with GameSpy to create a wireless multiplayer network. The network will be global, and, best of all, it will be FREE! Well, almost. You will need access to a WiFi hotspot. The first worldwide wireless title will be Animal Crossing, and you'll be able to visit other villages at any time. Also in the pipeline, due in Q4 of 2005, is Age of Empires 2: The Age of Kings. There will be WiFi support for up to four players. Castlevania DS will allow you to trade Tactical Souls with other players. What has me jazzed though is Shogun Warriors, a wireless RTS with support for up to 16 players via WiFi.


SWEET! They have heard our repeated pleading postings at nintendo.com to bring the RTS genre for the DS. It makes so much logical sense that I felt certain SOMEONE would do it. The PsP may have sweet graphics, but wi-fi online handheld RTS gaming. . .there's just no other way to do RTS on a handheld right without the screen/interface setup of the DS. I feel a lot vindicated here, as an early promoter of the "potential" for the DS to do this type of gaming despite no announcements of their intention to do so. I took a lot of crap about "all potential, no RTS titles."

I'm really stoked about Animal Crossing. I wonder if it will support online voice chat? My wife and I travel apart a lot (mainly, she travels a LOT), and as geeky as it sounds, it would actually be kinda fun to visit each other virtually via animal crossing rather than via cell phone. Moo la la.

[Brendon]

I got back into to town to find the Nintendo Power rag in my mailbox. There is an article about how Nintendo has teamed up with GameSpy to create a wireless multiplayer network. The network will be global, and, best of all, it will be FREE! Well, almost. You will need access to a WiFi hotspot. The first worldwide wireless title will be Animal Crossing, and you'll be able to visit other villages at any time. Also in the pipeline, due in Q4 of 2005, is Age of Empires 2: The Age of Kings. There will be WiFi support for up to four players. Castlevania DS will allow you to trade Tactical Souls with other players. What has me jazzed though is Shogun Warriors, a wireless RTS with support for up to 16 players via WiFi.
I'd get exited, but the actual chances of this hitting NZ are total Nil.

On the plus side, the DS has six buttons so a halfway decent version of Street Fighter with global Wifi on a handheld would be quite possibly the best thing ever, ever, ever.

Ever.

[Aylmer]

I'd get exited, but the actual chances of this hitting NZ are total Nil.

On the plus side, the DS has six buttons so a halfway decent version of Street Fighter with global Wifi on a handheld would be quite possibly the best thing ever, ever, ever.

Ever.

There are WiFi hotspots there in Kiwi-land, are there not? All you will need is a DS, the game cart and access to a hot spot and you'll be online. The article made mention of the fact that the SDKs for the games have very advanced networked gaming capability, so that development for WiFi based networked gaming is cheap and easy. They also said that getting your DS set up for networked gaming will be a piece of cake.

I just came off a long road trip, and nearly all the motels here in the US offer WiFi connectability now as an integral part of the room rental, even in remote rural areas.

Nintendo has an uncanny ability to plan far into the future. For instance, being able to unlock new Pokemon in a two year old cart with connectability to a new GC title. So I am psyched about the possibilities.

[Aylmer]

Animal crossing will be a blast, I'm sure. I sent lots of pictures to my wife via my cellphone and Palm device on my last trip. Things like a 3 legged cow in Arkansas. So she may get into gaming if there was a chance of decent player to player communication.

I will probably get a PSP, but I'm going to wait a while. While I was driving rental cars on my trip, I noticed that my music CDs would skip (and CD players are very mature technology) when I hit even a small bump in the road, and a couple of the cars had Bose decks!

So, it makes me wonder about the PSP. Like, what happens when you bump the PSP during disk access? I mean, the blue laser technlogy radically increases the density of the info on the disk, and logically, it would be more sensitive to shock. The worst that happens with a music cd is that you have to go back to the beginning of the track, but what happens with a game disk? Would you lose all your progress? Could a bump when saving data corrupt all the data on the medium? Only time will tell, I guess.

I fried a Dreamcast by slightly, and I do mean slightly, bumping it while it was accessing data. So, I'm a bit wary of moving parts in a handheld machine. However, my wife has been bugging me about a portable dvd player, so maybe a PSP would suffice...hehe.

[Cuddly Knife]

What's a WiFi "hotspot"? Really. I know nothing of what this is and how it'll allow me to play DS games on it.

[Gadfly2317]

What's a WiFi "hotspot"? Really. I know nothing of what this is and how it'll allow me to play DS games on it.

I'm not the guy to explain this, cause I'm kinda tech illiterate in some ways, but basically as I understand it its a trasnmitted standardized broadband internet signal you can connect to with wi-fi devices. I've recently been trying to learn about this because I'm intent on converting everything I have to wireless.

I got my wife a Dell Axim a couple weeks ago and it has both blue tooth and wi-fi, and I've been trying to learn the difference and how to use them. Blue Tooth seems to be basically a standardized means to allow devises with different operating systems to interact, i.e. her cell phone is blue tooth and she can go online via her cell phone with her Dell Axim (a pocket PC.)

Wi fi just seems to me like a basic internet connection but wireless. I could be totally confused about this, but all the coffee shops around where I live offer it, and you can sit as far aways as the parking lot in your car and wirelessly log onto the internet. I don't know if all wi-fi hotspots are open, or if some are password protected, but all the ones around where I live are free.

So as I understand it, I should be able to take my PsP, Laptop, pocket PC, or DS with me, have a double shot mocha espresso and play Animal Crossing with anyone anywhere in the world. Or Age of Empires.

I also think since the DS and PsP games that AREN'T online but are wi-fi multiplayer. . . that there are ways to rig it so you can game online. I've never been into online gaming, but for some reason portable/handheld gaming with stuff like Mario Kart and Animal Crossing and some of the stuff on the PsP has me totally stoked. Online so far has just been so much racing and shooting. I think the handhelds are our best chance for interesting online gaming.

[Aylmer]

What's a WiFi "hotspot"? Really. I know nothing of what this is and how it'll allow me to play DS games on it.

With so much hype about wireless this and that I will attempt to clarify it for you. WiFi is a standardized radio signal that is used specifically for high speed data networking. A WiFi 'hub' can 'see' many machines (PCs, PDAs, and Nintendo DS's) and acts as a connection to the internet. The standard range is about 100 meters (figure about the length of a football field).

A 'WiFi Hotspot' is simply one of these hubs. Although Starbucks gets all the press, the fact is that there are hundreds, and maybe even thousands, of hotspots in a given urban area because so many businesses are now wirelessly networked. I know people who park in commercial office parks and surf the web via some businesses' network while munching Burger King because hotspots are so easy to find. For WiFi enabled laptops and PDAs, there is software available that notifies you when you are in a hotspot. I assume that similar software is part of the DS OS.

Of course, you need a device that is WiFi compatible to take advantage of all this. As it so happens, the DS is such a device. Newer PCs have built in WiFi compatibility, slightly older ones need a card. But all the needed software and electronics is built in to the DS.

Bluetooth is a short range (about 10 meters) wireless technology used for just two devices (usually just two) at a time. It was designed for wireless PC peripherals, like printers, for instance. However, it has found it's way into lots of things. I have a Bluetooth cell phone, and when I take pictures with it, I can transmit them wirelessly to my PDA or PC. Also, with a digital access option for a Bluetooth cellphone, you can use a Bluetooth PDA or laptop that then sees the cellphone as a standard dial up modem. This allows you to access the web from anywhere in your cellphone service area, freeing you from the need for hotspots. However, it is very slow compared to WiFi. Another common use for Bluetooth is a wireless headset for a cellphone. When you see a wireless keychain fob that locks and unlocks a car from a distance, you're seeing a very similar technology to Bluetooth in action.

Anyway, the bottom line is that a DS has the WiFi hardware and software built in, so it should make an awesome portable online gaming system.