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

Iwata promised us an online Brawl at the launch of Wii. It turns out, while I expected him to be 0 for 2, that he’s 1 for 2. Today at the Smash Bros Dojo, the developer confirmed that you will be able to play matches online across the world, but you might experience a drop in performance over great distances. Sounds like they’ve tried their best but latency has got the better of them. That’s fine, I’ll take sometimes-laggy online play over none at all.

Unfortunately, it seems Nintendo’s weak online infrastructure has gotten the better of Brawl. There is a pre-arranged text taunting system rather than any kind of voice functionality, as James touched on in his mention of the latest editorial at IGN. At this point I’m thinking Nintendo should give up on providing online play for Wii games and let someone who knows what they’re doing take care of it. Oh wait, GameSpy’s behind this already. What the hell is going on?

Fortunately, as in Mario Kart DS, there is an anonymous online four-player fight available, meaning friend codes are not needed, and as you would imagine, this does away with the pre-arranged text taunts. I do like that you can beat up a sandbag while you’re waiting for the game to set itself up though.

All that’s left to do at this point is hope that the aforementioned IGN editorial has the desired effect and voice is plugged into the game before it launches. Even without though, it’s nice that Nintendo followed through on part of the promise. I don’t expect that I will do much anonymous Brawling with anyone really, as long as some of my friends are around to play.

WiFi Play at Smash Bros Dojo.