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Metroid DS Title Not So Much Online

Posted by Zonk on from the what's-the-point,-then? dept.

The much anticipated Metroid Prime: Hunters for the Nintendo DS has been revealed to be slated to release without multiplayer. 1up.com has the story: "Really, we could have made this game online. But Nintendo's vision of online play is different from that of other companies...We wanted it to be free, easy, and easy to access for everybody. To set up the kind of infrastructure that we needed, and to meet the launch date we have for this game, the two just didn't match."

4 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It DOES come with multiplayer by FriedTurkey · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I don't have 3 friends.

  2. The reason? by rohlfinator · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm assuming lag. A first person shooter almost always requires very quick response times, something that average broadband connection still doesn't allow across long distances. Notice that most online DS games will be quite casual, slow-paced games: Animal Crossing, Ultimate Card/Brain Games, Final Fantasy, Bomberman. The one exception is Mario Kart, but a bit of lag in a friendly kart-racing game won't be a huge deal.

    Nintendo is trying to make an online plan that caters to gamers who don't usually play online. The fewer sources of frustration, the better. I can't even count how many times I've seen Halo 2 lag, or how often CS has lagged on my home DSL. It gets frustrating, and the average gamer (you know, one of those 80+% that doesn't play online) won't tolerate it for very long.

  3. Gaming media sickens me by BinaryOpty · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The article's angry that Nintendo won't shoehorn in a wireless mode into Metroid Prime:Hunters. Mario Kart and Animal Crossing are doing it too, he says. Nintendo sucks and blah blah because this one game won't have online play!

    Oh, but wait, both of those "look they're online so why can't you be" games are based off of existing franchises and so the development time is much, much shorter than developing a completely new engine/game on a (then) brand new system? The turnaround time for putting a good online multiplayer that interfaces with Nintendo's sytem is too longfor Nintendo's tastes? Especially when when the details of their wireless system wasn't settled upon until halfway through said game's development cycle? I guess these aren't viable reasons to the gaming media. Who can say "bias?" I know I can!

  4. Re:It's about quality by buffer-overflowed · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I give it a month if not less before someone tunnels it(as they did for Halo, Mario Kart, and other "lan" play enabled games).

    --
    The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."