Virtually Useless

Of all the things I most appreciate about this current generation of consoles, the Virtual Console by far outshines movie rentals and international networking. Or at least it does to me. It clearly does not do much for Nintendo, given their treatment of the service. I do not want to harp on the old issue of Nintendo's serial abandonment of key features they pioneer. Instead, I want to discuss the DSi and their commitment to mediocrity.

I gladly stood in line for my DSi back in April. Well, I stood in Game Stop and chatted with my favorite employees as I was the only customer in the store around midnight. Perhaps my excitement/expectations for the handheld were verging on fanatical. That is what I am, a DS fanatic so consumed by the addictive potentials of portable RPGs, pet simulators, and imagining a variety of careers. Before you actually believe that sentence, know that I once had to recommend games in the Imagine series to unsure soccer moms because Ubisoft struck up a deal with Game Crazy that required us to do so. That left a bad taste in my mouth and a very grim outlook for the future of my trim and trendy portable.

I hoped the DSi would restore my faith in Nintendo's promises. Thus far I have been rewarded with clocks and calculators skinned in francises I'm really not that fond of. I like Mario games but I do not want a Mario calculator, even if it were free. I look at the DSi and remember the hopeful whisperings that spread across the internet before its Japanese launch. The DS already has all the strength to network with the Wii, and since the DSi would be fairly similar to the Wii in menus and services, it would then make sense that the networking would increase. Networking in terms of the Virtual Console. I feel Nintendo is completely overlooking numerous possibilities here, but are doing so in true Nintendo style.

Rather than improve the functionality of what already exists, they give us a third digital release store that is lacking in both quantity and quality. This is where I feel Sony has the upper hand in networking between console and handheld.

Remote play is a brilliant idea on their part. Certain elements of the PS3's library are accessible and even playable via the PSP through this way. This opens up the PSP user to the Pixel Junk games and to the various media stored on their much larger console's drive. This should not be some under-publicized Sony gem but rather an industry standard as handheld gaming becomes more realized every year.

There is no reason that I can see, other than Nintendo being completely uninterested, that the DSi would lack some sort of networking capability with the Virtual Console. The WiiWare store should remain with the Wii, just as the DSiWare store remains with the DSi. The Virtual Console should have the same versitility as the PSone classics. The fact that this was completely overlooked is a continuation of the sort of support I'm rappidly coming to expect from Nintendo: enough to get by, but not enough to truly satisfy anyone.

A dedication to multimedia should be fully realized. As the PS3/PSP interface has shown, multimedia comes with more interaction than a demo download service, which Nintendo already provides. Fully realized multimedia functionality comes with some amount of shared properties. Perhaps I am condeming Nintendo far too early in the DSi's life, but so far their releases have left me with this unsettling feeling that I wasted $169 on a device prepared to handle numerous calculators covered in various Nintendo properties. In the next three years I hope that something is done about this, but I already know the answer to this. Nothing will be done about it, just as Kid Icarus is NEVER going to be remade.