Gadfly2317
08-22-2005, 08:27 AM
http://portables.p-nintendo.com/articles/I-89-2.html
The following details were confirmed in an interview with Jim Merrick, head of European Marketing:
--Free
--Buddies List; as easy "as exchanging a phone number."
--Random Matching
--Matching based on skill level
--Will interface with your Nintendo.com account; buddies list, high scores, etc.
There are other details in the interview; but those are the ones that interested me. The specific comments on Mario Kart and Animal Crossing are also interesting:
What's interesting to us is to make sure online is a natural extension of the game. So you don't go to a completely different user interface saying now I'm on GameSpy and I'm looking for somebody. It just depends on how it looks like in each game. In Mario Kart, you get there, set up a tournament and find somebody to play with, but you never really see a user selection on the screen. It's still visually part of the race track, the kart in front of you... Animal Crossing is a different type of a game. You don't really want people you don't know coming into your village and chumping down your trees, turning up your house. It's a very personal thing, so you go to the train station, you buy a ticket to get to somebody else's village taking the train. It's very much in the context of each game, even though we have a server somewhere which manages everything: we mask that from the user.
The following details were confirmed in an interview with Jim Merrick, head of European Marketing:
--Free
--Buddies List; as easy "as exchanging a phone number."
--Random Matching
--Matching based on skill level
--Will interface with your Nintendo.com account; buddies list, high scores, etc.
There are other details in the interview; but those are the ones that interested me. The specific comments on Mario Kart and Animal Crossing are also interesting:
What's interesting to us is to make sure online is a natural extension of the game. So you don't go to a completely different user interface saying now I'm on GameSpy and I'm looking for somebody. It just depends on how it looks like in each game. In Mario Kart, you get there, set up a tournament and find somebody to play with, but you never really see a user selection on the screen. It's still visually part of the race track, the kart in front of you... Animal Crossing is a different type of a game. You don't really want people you don't know coming into your village and chumping down your trees, turning up your house. It's a very personal thing, so you go to the train station, you buy a ticket to get to somebody else's village taking the train. It's very much in the context of each game, even though we have a server somewhere which manages everything: we mask that from the user.