Nintendo Japan Starts Store-Based GBA Wireless Network

Thanks to Planet GameCube for its article discussing Nintendo Japan's rolling-out of the store-based JoySpot service for the Game Boy Advance wireless adapter. According to the article: "Consisting of wireless base stations - also known as hot spots - at retail locations around the country, JoySpot acts as a miniature server and hub for GBA games supporting the wireless adapter." Although players can use the limited-range wireless adapter with friends separately of the JoySpot locations, "...players can download news from the JoySpot station in Pokémon Fire/Leaf via the virtual JoySpot kiosks.. [and] can also take part in special JoySpot challenge battles among other gamers within the station's range by talking to them in the [virtual] union room."

Comments

Card Games?

[Anonymous Coward]

The first thing that comes to mind is how card game stores work: It's not only a place to sell cards, it's also a place for social gatherings to play cards. This in-store network might work out in the same way.

Imagine a store selling 'booster packs' to people, who then can scan them into their GBA, while arranging their game data to challenge others.. (which is technically feasible, if they upgrade the pokemon TCG game for CGB to be able to use the card reader..)

If you played Ruby/Sapphire...

[gasaraki]

They have this weird sort of "word selection" dialog where a large number of words are classified broadly under a bunch of categories, e.g. "actions", "places", "emotions", etc. It seems likely that the four-word system mentioned here would use a similar type of feature.

Just a thought...

[Gothic_Walrus]

If Nokia had provided a service like this for N-Gage, the system might not have been such a miserable failure...

The N-Gage might have Bluetooth capability, but how often do you find someone else with another N-Gage, let alone the same game, let alone that they're willing to play the game with you?

Re:NICE except

[KyolFrilander]

For whatever reason, Nintendo decided not to implement the standard wired communications protocol through the wireless adaptor, so only games that are _designed_ for wireless will work. Brilliant, I know. I mean, the wired link is a nasty little interrupt based hodgepodge and not very friendly at all, but *supposedly* the same bright guys that brought you the Afterburner frontlight kit for the original GBA figured out how to make a functional wireless adaptor that actually works with existing linkable games. It just doesn't seem like it'll see the light of day.

So yeah, the new Pokemon games and a couple of the famicon mini games support the new wireless adaptor, but other than that, bupkis.