jesta
Moderator
After months of anticipation, with Nintendoholics craving any slight detail about online communication in Mario Kart Wii, here's how it all went down on a beautiful thing called the internet:
First, we pondered amongst friends about the possibility of voice chat in the upcoming racer. When we found out that this wasn't happening, it was no biggie -- while some of you, we're sure, screamed in anguish to the heavens, most of us (being the realists that we are) never actually expected such a feature in the first place.
All hope was not lost, though. Praying to the Nintendo gods, we begged for some way of communicating with friends, so that our online matches would be deeper than normal matches against the computer. After all, what's the point of online play in the first place if it doesn't feel human? Our pleas did not go unnoticed, though, and Nintendo announced text chat support for the game.
The system wouldn't be perfect. There would be no text chatting during matches (not that we'd be able to physically pull that off in the first place, having only two hands and all). However, even being given the ability to create chat rooms to talk with our opponents was something.
In the end, though, we were misled. Apparently, Nintendo's definition of "text chat" is a lot different than ours. It doesn't involve "chatting," per say, so much as "choosing from a list of Nintendo's pre-determined phrases." Sounds fun, doesn't it?!? If by "fun," of course, you mean "nauseating" and "I'd rather facepalm myself, thank you very much." Oh, and in case you were wondering, there won't be a keyboard peripheral with the game -- you don't exactly need one to choose phrases like "Good luck!" and "Oh gee, this is fun!" from a list. Link
i really hate that. Why can't Nintendo be smart!?!?!?
