FYI:  We got some new games for Christmas, and here are the friend codes for those games:

Animal Crossing City Folk:  5112-7902-0335
Guitar Hero World Tour:  0302-3894-4530

Also, lots of Christmas pictures are coming soon.  Stay tuned.

For anyone out there I haven’t exchanged Super Smash Bros. Brawl friend codes with yet, here is mine: 3437-2813-1377.  If you want to give me yours, leave it in a comment of just e-mail me and I’ll add you.

In the month since the Wii was released, you’ve probably heard about problems with the wrist strap breaking, causing considerable damage.  I personally find it difficult to comprehend a scenario in which this would actually be a problem (and I’m not alone).  This past week our Wii moved out from under an evergreen and was placed beneath a television, and since then we have put in a lot of time on Wii Sports.  My two brothers especially enjoyed it, putting in nearly six hours of play time on Sunday alone.  In all of this time, there was no wrist strap present at all.  It only took about ten minutes for us to realize that the wrist strap did little besides get in the way.  I’ve yet to see a Wiimote even get dropped, much less thrown, even though we are all using full-force baseball swings and bowling ball tosses.

Is anyone else actually using the wrist strap?  If so, is it actually preventing anything?

Update:  My Wii friend code: 1974 6315 2837 8279.  Let me know your code if you want our Mii’s to mingle.

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”)