I think that anyone who has touched Xbox Live - well, save for Nintendorks who are fornicating with their Wii's as they read this - can agree that Nintendo's online service is severely lacking. I speak specifically of it's application to the DS, as I haven't had any experience with it on the Wii.

Xbox Live (XBL) gives you one username underwhich all of your games and friends are tracked, where Wi-Fi Connection (WFC) gives you a seperate tweleve-digit number for each game, and you can't track your friends via any sort of central hub.

XBL lets you choose from a list of hosted games, viewing settings and players before you join. If you meet someone you enjoy playing against, you can easily add them to your friend list. By contrast, WFC just throws you in with a batch of random players, sight unseen, and MOST games have no feature to let you add strangers to your friend list (Metroid Prime: Hunters and Custom Robo Arena are exceptions).

To date, the most robust online experience that I've seen on the DS is Metroid Prime: Hunters. It's got a true lobby system, voice chat (I don't expect in-game chat on the DS, so I won't go there), and the Rivals feature at least lets you build up a decent list of competition if your friend list is lacking.

So, Hunters proves that a half-way decent online system can be done. The only thing standing it its way of becoming GREAT is the Friend Code system. Again, having a seperate twelve-digit code for every game you play, and having no hub where you can go to track all of these codes (or the codes of your friends) makes for an incredibly frustrating experience. Want to see if, say, ReZ is online with his DS? You'll have to put in each of your DS games in turn, going online with them to see if he's on playing THAT game. Keep in mind that some games, like Animal Crossing, don't make it easy to get online, either.

I think it's obvious that Nintendo's service model is severely flawed. It's functional, but far from streamlined. Now that the service has been out for over a year, I think it's time Nintendo started to implement changes. Here's my suggestions:

1) Create a central hub for tracking your DS games' friends lists. Ideally I'd love to hear that they could do something like get a firmware patch out that removes Pictochat (sorry, three people using it) and replaces it with a Wi-Fi Hub. Realistically I'd settle for a website that did this, but if you've ever used the Nintendowifi.com, you probably know that Nintendo is insanely behind the curve on maintaining that.

2) Rivals list in any competitive game. It can be done. It has been done. It works. Nintendo should make that a must for all of their developers and studios.

What else could they do to polish the service up?

Sadly, I agree. Nintendo has always drug its feet when it comes to online play and I really think that's a shame because some of their games would really lend themselves to having a robust online system. The online features in Pokemon Diamond are cool but they could be world's better if they were just more simplistic. As it stands it's like you have to go to this person in this building if you want to do this online but if you want to do that you have to go to that person in that building... it's both confusing and cumbersome which is a huge no-no as far as online gaming is concerned. And the friend code thing is completely unnecessary... to me that's what makes Xbox Live so great. One name, one account, one list of contacts with easy access to these features. It's simple and practical... people don't want to go online if it's going to be a huge hassle and unfortunately right now that's what a lot of Nintendo's online offerings are. And it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nintendo doesn't really believe in online so they implement some half-baked features which in turn no one uses because they're too complicated or impractical and then Nintendo points to the fact that no one uses their online features so gamers must not want to play online. Of course the current online system is world's better than the GameCube's (which basically didn't exist) so I guess Nintendo is making progress... just.very....slowly.

Actually, that's another point. Did you know that Nintendo will not let you share Friend Codes over their websites or forums? From what I read, they even went as far as blocking the ability to share email addresses, because people were sharing their FC's via email.

Nintendo is shooting themselves in the foot in their bull-headed attempt to make the WFC completely family friendly and pedophile-free. It's like they don't want you to have any FC's on your list unless you know the person IRL, and are able to call them up and schedule DS time. That's not practical by any stretch of the imagination.

That's a large part of it, I think. Iawata (or whatever his name is) made the comment back during the Gamecube/PS2/Xbox generation that gamers "didn't want to play games online".

One million WFC users later, Nintendo has been proven wrong on that, and it seems like they are begrudgingly offering this service, but ONLY on their terms.