Now I’ve got Nintendo WFC working, after a lot of headaches with my router.  I wrote up a description of what I did on the Nintendo forums, which you can see here, so that hopefully someone else won’t have the same headache.  I seriously hope they make some major improvements to WFC by the time the Revolution comes out.

Without further ado, here are my complaints:

1. “Friend codes” are retarded.  This seems like the same mistake ICQ made when instant messaging was a new concept.  Let everyone pick whatever screen name they want, but everyone gets an annoyingly long ID number.  And if I only had one friend code I’d be willing to let that slide.  But I don’t.  I have one for every single WiFi game!  Which, at the moment, is two (see below).  But if they are serious about this (especially third party support), they should make a system where your handle is something the DS keeps track of, not each individual game.

2. I can’t see which friends are online.  There should be a way to quickly get a menu of my friends that are online, and a way of sending a “hey, wanna play Mario Kart?” message to them.  And, as I said before, this should be done on the OS level, not on a per-game basis.  Currently you have to kind of arrange a play date if you want to play.

3. I can’t communicate with people I’m playing with.  Well, in Animal Crossing I can.  But I still think this should be a system-level feature, not something every game developer must implement.

4. Friend code is specific to game/system combination.  In other words, if I put my Mario Kart in Stephanie’s DS and go online, I’ll have to say goodbye to my friend code when I put it back in my system, and give all my friends a new friend code.  As I said before, if the friend code was handled just by the OS, this wouldn’t be an issue.

Our friend codes!
Mario Kart DS
Kip: 481098-624409
Stephanie: 150386-138145

Animal Crossing Wide World
Kip:  2319-9061-8694 (“Agent 86” from “Ninjäna”)
Stephanie:  2792-3525-8250 (“Darcy” from “Daisyton”)