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Nintendo President Talks Wii/DS Hookup

GameDaily has a look at comments by Nintendo's President Iwata about connectivity between the DS and the Wii. He also touches on the Virtual Console, and Nintendo's place in the marketplace. From the article: "Let's say your Wii is connected to the Internet in a mode that allows activation on a 24-hour basis. This would allow Nintendo to send monthly promotional demos for the DS, during the night, to the Wii consoles in each household. Users would wake up each morning, find the LED lamp on their Wii flashing, and know that Nintendo has sent them something ..."

8 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. Or, in the traditional FUD mode, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    "Users would wake up each morning, find the LED lamp on their Wii flashing, and know that Nintendo has banned them and fried their mod chips ... "

  2. Re:Do I get a say in the matter? by kinzillah · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Except it practically is, in that you probably weren't going to use all of it, and you're not paying anything extra for the additional transfer.

    --
    Douglas P. Price
  3. Corporate Aikido by jthill · · Score: 4, Interesting
    You'll want a simple bowl of rice and soup every now and then.
    Who knows how long ago theysaw the opportunity? But they've got a big chunk of the market all to themselves, and everything Nintendo says earns them fans. MS and Sony are hurtling off down the high-inertia major-loss-leader path while Nintendo picks up their rice bowl and has a nice lunch.
    --
    As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
  4. The Whole Interview by grammar+fascist · · Score: 5, Informative
    The entire interview is here:

    http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20060 525/117498/?P=1

    GameDaily summarized (or copied) what they found most interesting. I find this moreso:

    Q: Why does your controller have a speaker?

    Iwata: This feature was absent from the prototype a year ago - we introduced it fairly recently. We discussed what type of feedback the games should provide the user with. Households sporting 5.1 channel speakers will certainly be able to enjoy realistic sound, yet not all homes have such audio equipment. Adding a speaker to the controller will enable us, for example, to have it emit sound effects when hitting the ball in ping-pong, tennis or golf games.


    Not only that, but 5.1 can't produce a sound exactly where you are no matter where you are in the room.

    Yet another instance of Nintendo anticipating their customer's needs rather than (or in addition to) listening to their gripes. What customer would have said "speaker in the controller!" rather than "more 5.1 support?"
    --
    I got my Linux laptop at System76.
  5. 3 GB per month Caps in .nz and .au by tepples · · Score: 5, Informative

    you actually pay per byte to download? You need a better ISP.

    Try a better country. The oligopoly situation in e.g. Australia and New Zealand, combined with the limited bandwidth on and off the continent, has allowed residential "broadband" providers to get away with billing per megabyte over the first 3000 in a month.

  6. Re:Not all that jazzed about this... by headkase · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...I don't do anything I wish to hide on the internet, to do so is simply retarded. However, I do have a cable modem which is notoriously insecure anyway, and why leave it on if a) it's not in use and shouldn't be, and b) only takes the flick of one finger for it to instantly return? Why rely on a firewall when I can just make absolute certain nothing errant will happen, when it has absolutely no adverse affect at all? ...

    You probably keep a bucket of water next to your PC just in case it suddenly becomes malevolently intelligent too...

    --
    Shh.
  7. I can see it already... by Trevin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Wii spam.

    At first it may just be Nintendo spam. But they may open it up to let 3rd party game publishers send spam of their own. And how long do you think it will be before someone figures ot how to upload data to the Wii from anywhere?

  8. Re:Not all that jazzed about this... by cgenman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There is just no need. Whatever little present in Animal Crossing, or whatever little "neato" thing they are going to download is going to only take a few seconds at most; could probably be done while the thing is booting up and we wouldn't even notice.

    My Wii won't be connected 24/7, because I refuse to leave my Internet on that much. I flip the switch on the cable modem at night to cut it off, and turn it on in the AM.... I know wireless is all the rage among certain people, but why do wireless when I already have ethernet cable available in every room?


    I'm not saying you're wrong. But I would guess you're in the minority. Most people leave their always-on internet connections... on. There is really no reason to turn them off. Your cable modem hasn't been a bastion of worms and security holes in a while, and the cable / DSL company knows the instant any of the firmware changes, and can change it back. Don't believe me? Try uncapping it, and see how long your hack goes unnoticed. Now try uncapping it or hacking it through the provider's network. Basically impossible.

    Most people also don't have ethernet in every room, and the prevalance of ethernet seems on the wane. There is a reason every laptop ships with wireless as a standard feature. Now explain to someone that they need to run 50' of cat 5 from a compatible router (not switch or hub) inserted between their modem and PC, out to their living room, and you'll see why WiFi is catching on. Security settings will need to be finessed from a software side, but even then it shouldn't be too bad. And wireless security these days is great, with WPA. Even WEP wasn't bad, as a good WEP key takes about 20 hours of sniffing around high-traffic areas to crack. A home WEP network with moderate traffic takes weeks or months. And on a modern router cracking into the wireless portion gets you... internet surfing, posing little risk to the internal network if you have anything but the default administrator password. And even if you get that, you still need to get by that computer's firewalls and virus scanners.

    A DS Demo size is capped at 4MB (the primary RAM), so you'll probably see 2MB demos in practice... Maybe a minute if the connection is dirty. But it would also probably not be the sort of thing you'd want to sit around for. It just makes sense to do it when the player isn't doing anything else. And maybe they want to upload a free play of Sonic 3 that evening. Yeah, you don't need it, but if you want to try it's already downloaded, saving you time, or it's automatically deleted, costing you nothing. As long as they're not abnoxious about it, this would be a nice little bonus. The only bad thing about Xbox Live Arcade is the actual tedious download of demos, and this seems to alleviate that.

    And if you can figure out a way to make it download games while still booting the OS, by all means go right ahead. I'd love to see that code.