» 1 Million DS WiFi Users1 Million DS WiFi Users

Nintendo WiFi Logo
Nintendo have announced that they have now passed the huge milestone of it’s one millionth individual user to log on to the DS WiFi service. This is pretty amazing, especially given that the service is only used by a small number of DS games at present (the main ones being Mario Kart, Animal Crossing and Tony Hawks) and that the service only launched in November 2005!

The accolade of one millionth player goes to an unnamed user in Japan, who was logging on to play Animal Crossing: Wild World.

The next big game to utilise the service will undoubtedly by Metroid Prime: Hunters, which as well as having multiplayer online play is also set to include Voice Over IP functionality where players can chat using the microphone of the DS. Sadly, this feature is only available outside of game play, and there are also rumours going around that this facility won’t be available in Europe for some legal reason, which would be a disappointment.

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4 Comments on “1 Million DS WiFi Users”

Boll Says:

March 9th, 2006 at 10:39 am

Ooh MH, my current game du jour. I think its been well accepted that the games use of, an reason for, lobby only voip is a good thing. The most obvious being lag issues. The others being, have you played Halo2 recently…? Answers on the back of a postcard.

Don’t forget also that Tetris DS is being released the same day in the US that MH hits.

Boll Says:

March 9th, 2006 at 10:43 am

Oh and where did you hear this rumour of voip being disabled for Europe? I’ve heard nothing on that and I seriously doubt it will happen…?

Sean Says:

March 9th, 2006 at 1:31 pm

There’s a reference made to the lack of VOIP in Europe here. It even states that importing a US version (which will run fine on Euro DS) won’t make a difference either.

I wonder if this restriction may just be if you’re connecting via one of the free WiFi hotspots for bandwidth reasons. Most of the hotspots (in the UK anyway) are the same ones which people have to pay to use laptops with, so the operators are probably concerned about large volumes of data being passed about for free.