Monster Hunter Portable, which came to the US as Monster Hunter Freedom, is a surprisingly fun and addictive game. Even if they did cut the quest downloading feature out of it for the North American market (grr!). It’s the PSP’s best selling game to date in Japan, and it has the dubious distinction of being ad-hoc WiFi only (GRR!). It’s good enough that many gamers like me spent a good $40 on the Datel WiFi Max adapter (pictured) and downloaded XLink Kai to play it online, and it actually worked well.

The game has a pretty deep crafting mode and has a wide variety of armor and weaponry your hunter can make and use. When I rented it I found it to be a great pick-up-and-play game good for short play time bursts or longer missions. If I didn’t have much time, I’d jump in and re-run a quick gathering mission to pick up raw materials, and if I was able to set up an online match I’d take a stab at the hunting missions which often got very difficult very quickly. It also is structured so you absolutely need multiple players to take down monsters in most of the quests. Without online WiFi this is a big problem in the US market, which is why I rented it instead of buying it.

When I heard about the sequel — Monster Hunter Portable 2nd — I was hopeful that online play would be added. It’s coming out in Japan on February 22nd and so far it looks like Capcom has once again missed the online play boat! Has Capcom lost the part of the PSP dev kit which explains that the WiFi radio has an Infrastructure mode? Do Sony, Zipper, and Konami need to call them up and give them a talking-to?

I mean come on, this isn’t some very picky WiFi chipset like you get in the DS, this is a highly compatible WiFi radio that is strong enough not just to surf the web, download demos, videos, and music to the PSP but it can also play games. Real games! So get with the program Capcom and show us what you can do with online play. For crying out loud would it be too hard just to set up online-linked trading posts for players in Monster Hunter? Sheesh.