Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

After passively hearing people whine and whine about Nintendo’s “friend code” system, and how oh-so-terrible it is, I’ve finally reached my fill. You might be surprised to learn that there’s really nothing wrong with friend codes as a concept, and in fact, it’s really just a slightly different implementation of something you’re all already using, like buddy lists. In the end, if you do the research, you might just get that friend codes are gaming’s best chance of getting most gamers, including myself, online.

ANIMAL CROSSING: WILD WORLD

The skinny. For those who aren’t familiar, Nintendo’s Animal Crossing franchise (Doubutsu no Mori, or Animal Forest in Japan) began on the N64 in Japan, was given a greatly enhanced port on US Gamecubes some time later, and then finally was re-localized in the opposite direction for the Japanese Gamecube. It’s what you might call a sleeper hit. It’s a hard game to describe, but think of it as The Sims combined with Harvest Moon, where only player characters are human and all the NPCs are various upright-walking animals who talk, gossip, buy and sell things, etc. The Wild World episode for the DS is by far the most successful Animal Crossing, selling millions of copies worldwide and debuting as Nintendo’s first online game for Nintendo WiFi Connection.

Offline multiplayer. Multiplayer in Wild World is effective, but simple. Players can visit each other’s villages (no more than three visitors plus the player at one time). The host speaks to a guard at a gate, asks them to open the gate, chooses whether it’s someone nearby (which would be wireless DS-to-DS connection) or someone far away (which would be wireless over the Internet, using WFC). You can make a DS-to-DS connection with anyone who has a copy of the game simply by having one player open their gate, and the other tells their gate guard they want to head out.

Online multiplayer. Now, if you want to play online with someone, you need to exchange friend codes. A friend code is a string of numbers that is generated using a specific copy of a game and a specific DS system. Think of it as a cross between a username and a password, but harder to remember because you can’t compose it yourself. The reason you need a friend code to play Animal Crossing: Wild World online is because you’re given a great deal of freedom when roaming in another’s town. Bring an axe? You can cut down trees. Bring a shovel? You can dig holes all over the place. Bring money? You can shop the shelves of the store bare. Bring your bare hands? You can uproot all the town’s flowers. And perhaps most problematic, if you brought your stylus, you can curse at each other, or solicit sex with a minor. Allowing people to anonymously hook up and endanger each other the way they do on Instant Messenger is not something any of us want to be involved in. But on the other side, if you take out all the interactivity in the town, the experience is not worth your time. Friend codes make a game like this possible.

Making friends. When you’re linked in a local multiplayer session, you pop open the menu, pop open the friends submenu, select one of the people you’re linked with, and add them to your list with a touch. Or if you want, you can add someone who’s not linked up by going to the same place and adding them by putting down their name, town, and friend code. Which they would have to give you of course. The first time you connect to someone you’ve added to your list, the symbol next to their name changes from a triangle to a ring to show the code’s good.

MARIO KART DS

The skinny. Mario Kart began on the Super NES as Super Mario Kart. The go-kart racing franchise has landed on just about every Nintendo platform since, and is considered not only the origin of the genre, but its pinnacle as well. Five episodes on, Mario Kart DS has got more multiplayer options than Animal Crossing: Wild World.

Offline multiplayer. You’ve got all the local wireless action, once again without friend codes needed, letting people race together or battle, anything you like in that respect. You can share one cartridge through DS Download Play, which is just a function that sends a functional chunk of the game to another DS. In Mario Kart, this lets you play up to eight players locally simultaneously, using just one copy of the game.

Online multiplayer. Going online cuts the maximum number of players in half to four, and you still don’t need friend codes to race together online. Why not? Well, because there’s no personal interactivity involved. No voice chat, no text chat (as if that would work anyway), just racing and more racing. Which isn’t to say racing in Mario Kart DS online isn’t fun, it just really ought to be so much more. Friend codes in this game are used to maintain a kind of buddy list. What this does is, when you’re setting up a match, you have the option of racing with either rivals (which would be other players similarly ranked to you), regional (which would be those who are physically in your region), worldwide (which would be anyone, even if their name’s in Japanese and you can’t read it), or friends. Friends looks for people who are on your buddy list and groups you in a game.

Making friends. Here comes the annoying part. In order to add someone to your buddy list, you need their friend code, and you need to enter it manually, one digit at a time. And the payoff is not a change in the game, just that the people in the race are people you know. You still can’t talk smack to them while driving, which is disappointing. But I hold out hope we’ll see that in the next episode on Wii.

The list goes on. There are some other WFC games on the DS, like Metroid Prime Hunters. I haven’t played Hunters online, but you can play it online against other people without the use of friend codes. If you trade friend codes with someone, you can do one-on-one matches (just like in Mario Kart DS), and you can do voice chat while in the lobby, and hear each other. I haven’t played the game online since I heard that people using ROMs of the game had hacked the code to make themselves invincible and were turning the legitimate playing field into a worthless exercise. I had planned to try it online after I beat the single player mission but now will be stuck finding someone I can trust with a friend code to play against. Friend codes become the ultimate jackass eliminator.

Tetris is another example. In Tetris DS, you don’t need someone’s friend code to play it online. These are the first party games, now. Games made by Nintendo, none of which exclude you from playing the meat of the game online without a friend code.

Friend codes only serve as a means to control who you interact with in a personal way online, and I think they are a good thing. They are the means by which I can shield myself online from the stereotypical online gamer who will spray racial epithets at me while squatting over my fragged corpse. And that is the very thing that’s kept me from wanting to play games online with strangers this long.