So, the point of online play in a game is generally to let you play anyone, anywhere via the network if you really want to. Right?

Nintendo seems to think not. A disgruntled gamer has sent this complaint about the Mario Strikers Charged wireless play to pretty much every outlet that'll listen to him (since Nintendo deleted it on their official forums). He bought Mario Strikers to play matches with a buddy in Finland, to which the network said "lol, no".

In order to add a friend to play them online you both have to add a friend to your address book by typing in a 16-digit string of numbers... OK fine. I can deal with that.

I thought that would be the end of it if I wanted to play my friend in Mario Strikers Charged, but I had to enter in another 12-digit code just to do that. However we both just found out that the WFC for online game play is region-locked so we can't even ADD each other to our friends list to play!

Pretty lame. I wasn't watching Nintendo as closely back when Strikers came out, but I wonder how public the info about the WFC region lock was? Probably not public enough...

Mario Strikers Charged screens on GamePro.com

More articles about Mario Strikers Charged

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klarthailerion

I hadn't heard anything about it until close to last holiday season, which was half a year after the releases of Mario Strikers Charged and Pokemon Battle Revolution in the states. This is yet another questionable flaw in Nintendo's online network, but it probably won't be a show-stopper in the long run for most people.

specific_chris

I wonder if they can fix that?

Online play is pretty horrible in general, but man I'll be the first to admit I like to smoke friends over the wire at Mario Kart DS. I'm just not internet-social I think. Something about 10 year olds with a full sailor vocabulary and a stack of cheat books just kind of turns me off the idea.

klarthailerion

Well, I don't know for sure how they've set up their server farms for the WFC, and I'm not sure how they're running the information through those networks. As long as it's a software issue and not a hardware issue, it should be easy enough to "unlock" the region binding at the server level and at the client level (via a Wii Update).

Come to think of it, I don't know if Nintendo is running this service themselves or if they've outsourced it. If it's been outsourced to different companies in the different regions, it may be more difficult to enable cross-region connectivity because the hardware isn't all being managed from one organization.

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