New to the DS: voice chat, download stations, possible web browser
Posted by inpheaux on February 9th, 2006 at 3:35 pm
King_Andy, our resident Virtual Reality Specialist, tends to take every chance he gets to bemoan the fact that apart from Nintendogs, the only thing DS games seem to use the microphone input for is to detect blowing. Furthermore, he [and others, obviously] has argued that surely there's enough overhead in WFC to permit voice chat, so why don't we have it?
Well, in just over a month we will.
At the DICE conference today, Nintendo announced several big things. First: Metroid Prime Hunters will have in-game voice chat. Here's a quote from the press release:
"Players in North America can simply click the chat icon and say what they have to say. The microphone of the Nintendo DS picks up voice communication and transmits it to the people on their friend list. Players can use the chat function before a match to agree on settings or after a battle to relive their glories."
This is good. First, good because it's not just straight up open voice chat, so you won't be greeted with a string of obscenities from some mouthbreathing pre-teen loser upon joining a random game. Second, it's good because it fixes the one thing that really really bugged me about online Mario Kart: DS - no ability to talk to the people I'm shamelessly smoking. No way to tell them "Don't worry about trying real hard to pick a map you like, I'm probably going to win anyway, hell, I picked 'random'". No way to bitch at people when they try to make a comeback with a blue shell, an offense that would usually result in a friendly punch in the arm. It's really hard to get into online multiplayer when everyone's mute. But yeah, that'll be fixed now.
Nintendo also announced that they'll be attempting to roll out wireless demo-download stations through retailers in North America like they have over in Japan. So finally we'll be able to get some mileage out of the DS's great demo system. This is expected to be out in time to coincide with the absolutely insane March lineup of games. Hopefully this will go a little better than the Nintendogs downloadable-present-at-Gamestop shenanigains from last fall.
Finally, a short trip to Rumor Land. Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo of America's VP of Marketing, was recently interviewed by EGM. He spent most of the interview dodging questions about the Revolution, but near the end leaked out a very unsurprising comment regarding a theoretical forthcoming DS Web Browser:
"My belief is that we thought a licensee was getting into that area [browser development], and once we heard that we backed off. If we end up seeing that nobody’s really going to enter that space, it may be something that we’ll go back and look at. I know that Mr. Iwata has talked about it."
So they had a prototype, but then they heard someone else was going to do it for them. Super. A DS web browser would be juuuuust about as far into the realm of device convergence I'd like to see the DS go. It'd be very nice to be able to scout open access points and then hop online to quickly check news or whatever, without having to pull out my laptop and wait for that to boot up just to find that local AP's suck. It'd also be far nicer than whipping out my phone and getting violently raped by Cingular's data transfer prices. So a DS web browser would definitely fill a hole in my device usage. And it's nice to know that if the current theoretical one falls through, Nintendo seems willing to pick up the slack and make one on their own.
Source: Nintendo.com via 4cr.
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