Internet in an uproar! Will I have to pay to play Brawl online?
 

No internet. You will not. Stop being stupid. Oh right internet.

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Details are vague, but this can hardly be construed as more than an infrastructure for DLC and monthly subscriptions to MMO's.

Or a little more far-fetched, paying extra for the "grown-up version," eliminating friend codes and adding voice chat. Unless that would also come with dedicated servers, personally I'd rather stick to the free version.

The common reaction to this, however, is "FUCK N¥NTENDO I WILL NOT PAY FOR FRIEND CODES." Understandable, if that were the case, but this is massive jumping to conclusions. AND THEY'RE GOING TO GO BACK IN TIME AND CHARGE FOR JAPANESE ONLINE BRAWL, EVEN.

Specifically, I would bet this is for a Phantasy Star Online. Maybe Animal Crossing, as that could generate HUEG PROFITS from the Wii's vast casual crowd. Any other guesses?

EA completely removed the online mode from Medal of Hemroid Heroes 2 on Wii here because they couldn't afford setting up some local 486 servers. Then they charged $95 US for the game anyway. Maybe now if we pay fifty thousand dollars a month to play shit onrine, this sort of economy crushing crisis will never happen again!

Animal Crossing here we come! Tom Nook could charge real money for his pink chairs and rocket shaped stereos. =D

Good lord, I hadn't even thought of Nook yet. That's just sinister.

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This and the White Engine being retooled for the Wii certainly made today an odd day for Nintendo news.

I don't see the big deal. I was curious how Nintendo could possibly handle MMOs when they require so much more server junk than, say, a First-Person Shooter, it made me wonder if the console simply wouldn't see anything large in scale for the Wi-Fi Connection. This way, at least, we see things like WiiDLC and Crystal Chronicles Online being feasible.

When I read this earlier today, I thought it could only point towards one game (if you exclude Animal Crossing, but I think an MMO-type conversion for it to Wii may drive away their previous demographic; i.e. the expanded base).

I'd think this only affects 3rd Party developers... Nintendo is too good to it's customers to implement this system on their own games (like Brawl and Animal Crossing).

[look in trackjacket's spoiler] on the other hand, would be completely understandable. They want more of a profit and giving buyers just the basic crap and nothing else would drive everyone away in a heartbeat. At that point it's not worth getting.

However, if DLC is available, Nintendo is going to have to do something about their small flash memory inside the console. 512 MB isn't enough to hold anything no matter which way you look at it.

I doubt Animal Crossing would be part of the "pay-to-play" service. The game on the DS was more of P2P than a server and I would think it would be the same for the Wii.

Everything else has been said already. XP

Well yeah, I'd sure as hell hope Animal Crossing won't be, but the financial incentives might be too much for them to pass up.

The same could already be said of VC and WiiWare games. Nintendo's solution being "Go buy an SD card."

Then they better make them cheaper. :|

SD cards are relatively cheap, assuming you don't buy Nintendo's. It's like $12 for 2 gigs of SD memory, and even less if on sale. Regardless, I don't think Nintendo would charge for online play (or at least basic online play). For Downloadable Content, maybe, but not basic online play.

Of course, if they did do DLC, a firmware update to support USB Hard Drives would fix that right up. But Somehow, I doubt Nintendo will do this anytime in the near future.

Heh, this reminds me when Reggie said to "use a forum" when people was complaining about Friend Code and Sakurai said to use Skype when IGN told him that people are complaining that SSBB should have voice chat. So I wouldn't be surprise at all if that's Nintendo solution to storage space. :(

Actually, I just read something new on that subject that no one else reported on (from the same GDC session).
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It probably won't really "eliminate any futher space issues," but this should help. But it'll probably mean long start up times. =/

That's a temporary solution at best, and definitely not the proper one for the "core" gamer. I can't figure out why Nintendo is so averse to other storage options. When Wii still bore the code-name Revolution, Iwata had said that users would be able to choose what they would like to use as a storage medium. Be it SD cards, flash drives, or external hard drives. Why they never followed through on that, I don't know. I guess, simply enough, is that there isn't a demand for it outside of the "core" gamer segment. Though, I still don't understand why it would impose any problems on the expanded base by just allowing us to hook up whatever we wanted to Wii. It can't be fear of piracy that has caused this lack of initiative.

Nintendo's probably praying that smaller, solid-state drives will be cheap by the time the next-gen hits, because I can't foresee them making this mistake again.

I suppose they're looking at a firmware update sometime in the future that's going to make games bootable from an SD card without having to be copied over. Crisis averted.

I really wouldn't mind the absense of hard drive support providing they allow booting games off of SD. You can get huge SD cards now so that would be a nice solution. Plus, my Wii looks nice where it is, and I'd rather not tether an ugly HD to it.

No, the limit to SD cards for the Wii is 2 GB. The Wii does not and cannot read SDHC cards. That would require new harddware. You can't fix that with firmware which is a shame.

I would hope by the next time a new Nintendo comes around SSD comes down in price and increases in size considerably. I still find the 512 mb internal flash to be ridiculously small. Nintendo should have put 2 GB in there. It's super cheap stuff. I can't even fill up all of the channels with stuff before I run out of space. That is an atrocity.

Hmm, even when compressed, it will still need space when it's uncompressed! That isn't a solution.

Also, why do Nintendo need to be an ass when it comes to "transferring" over some save game data? I understand Nintendo doesn't want people to cheat by sharing some save game (NOTE: So far you cannot copy [or MOVE; they remove that option!] a save Wi-Fi/online game to a SD card... SSBB is freakin' 128 blocks, about 16MB!) .So those data will be stuck in your Wii internal memory unless you feel like deleting it and start all over again if you decided to play it at a later date.

A new firmware should allow MOVING those protected data and encrypting it so it will only be play on the same Wii when it was moved... like how they do for VC games!