Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection Ends Tuesday for Wii, DS

sending?

Over the aero-waves!

:(

Looks like I'll be jumping on Mario Kart DS today.

EDIT: I can't since I have a WPA router, so I can't connect to it with my DS. Worst day :(

Booo!

I'm really gonna miss playing Mario Kart Wii. I spent 100's of hours racing online since that game came out in 2008.

Not 100 Classic Books!

@crippl3: If your router happens to support dual bands, you could change one of them to an open network and give it a different name, then log on that way. Or just change your main network to not have a password for a while. What's the worst that could happen?

Crap, this affects all the Professor Layton games and Picross 3D.

This means a whole bunch of content will go away forever.

Ah man. No more Jump Ultimate Stars for me I guess D:

While this is a bummer for sure, I've always found the internet's reaction odd when online servers get shut down. They bitch and whine and get actively angry about servers that are getting shut down after, in some cases, 10 years of being active.

Is it really so inconceivable a concept that a company might shut down their decade-old legacy servers? It's saving bandwidth costs, and it will (hopefully) allow Nintendo to upgrade the current servers. The internet acts like it's this outrageous thing, when it's really, really not.

QUICK EDIT: I don't mean anyone on Giant Bomb, I was talking more about the rest of the internet. The comments on this article seem generally somber but not angry.

It wasn't listed, I think we're safe. Hopefully.

I assume Giant Bomb won't be doing a farewell stream?

@jetman81: Not my router to mess with, otherwise I would. Oh well.

Farewell Mario Kart DS, I'll miss you. Farewell snaking Dry Bones bastards, I won't miss you.

Reading this list hurts.

In my dreams, Jeff resurrects NDX for a special reunion episode.

That'd be amazing.

"The many hours spent playing Mario Kart DS in college are suddenly coming back to me."

Exactly. Although I'd also put Tetris DS in that sentence.

I got most of my nintendo wii-fi time playing Monster Hunter Tri online and that shut down a while ago, so I'm not too sad about this. I did play Mario Kart Wii online a few times, though.

Well, fuck you too, Nintendo.

It's just sad that companies don't plan ahead and implement an option that doesn't use their service, even though it would disable some benefits of the service such as matchmaking, stats tracking or whatever that would be, such as an option to host or connect directly to a specific IP. It's understandable that their own service won't last forever, but lots of 90's and early 00's PC games are still very playable today thanks to the foresight of developers implementing an alternate way of connecting to games beyond their own metaserver, and I suppose the knowledge that it's totally possible to play Descent 3, QuakeWorld, even CyberStrike (which was originally made for the long defunct GEnie Online Service in 1993) online today, makes the concept of irrevocably closing a much more recent game down seem pretty weird.

Mario Kart DS online was immediately ruined for me by everyone getting absurdly good at snaking and only half of the courses in the game being available.

Farewell, Mario Kart DS. We had some good times. Farewell, Mario Kart DS snakers. Eat shit and die :)

I'm a little sad that I'll never get further with the weekly "DLC" in Dragon Quest. But I did about 2/3 of those quests years ago before stalling out forever. 202 hours of entertainment in one cartridge is nothing to sneeze at! And if I ever want a "perfect" save I've heard rumblings that there are illicit ways to do that.

I only got Monster Hunter Tri about a month before Capcom shut those servers down, so that kind of sucked. I thought the list of Wii games would be longer. I know the Brawl community is pretty bummed about this.

So many things I never done did...

A great point.

This article just reminded me that I still need to get a copy of Picross 3D, which I guess will now be slightly less cool but THAT GAME IS STILL SUPER AWESOME

isn't this because of gamespy closing? how is this Nintendo's fault?

Edit : Kudos to Patrick for mentioning the gamespy closure in this story ... oh wait.

Wait, was Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection powered by GameSpy's technology?!

@pxabstraction: Yes

well, this sucks. Its kinda sad its shutting down so early, especially for Pokemon BW2, which hasn't been out for 2 years in the west yet.

Boy, they didn't give people very long to move their Pokemon from Black/White over to the new games, unless that works on a different system.

@rulerofeden: I'm ok with servers ending but if a game is still very active it should stay on.

I'm willing to bet Mario Kart Wii still gets some gamers, now it's time to kill it and force fans to move to the new Wii U game, that is conveniently coming out in a few days.

I really want to see about pooling people together for like, a livestream or something to do a send off of Nintendo WFC on the Wii. I'm assuming the Giant Bomb staff don't want to deal with the Wii's online play (and lets face it, who does?) But I'd like to play Mario Kart Wii, Excite Bots or something online before they're taken away.

It's a real shame to see the servers shut down quite so abruptly. While it is usually a bit depressing to see a beloved MMO reach the end of its lifespan, an entire online service shutting down is far, far worse and not only because it's on a larger scale.

For a start, it means that some content will simply be forever gone on many copies of various games which still exist, either because said downloadable content required reaching a certain part in the game or just because it wasn't added until later in the game's lifespan after most players had already finished the available content. The other issue is that some of these games still have at least decently active populations, so this will affect a larger amount of players than the shutdown of a single game on its deathbed normally would.

However, the biggest issue here is the lack of any chance for any sort of revival. If a single game shuts down, there is still the chance of another publisher picking it up down the line or even of players simply creating some sort of private server (sometimes even with the blessing of the original developers/publishers). Unfortunately, revivals of entire online services are virtually unheard of so this death is much more 'final' than most.

This would be amazing. I hope someone does this.

I think there might have been some connection, but that could just be my mind failing me. Would make a lot of sense though.

Probably my favorite Nintendo WFC memory was playing in the online Brawl and encountering a pink Captain Falcon who jumped around the map spamming the "show me your moves!" taunt rather than engaging in combat. I would find out later that this person was most likely one of my friends.

Ah shit. I'm going to hop on to Mario Kart DS for a few more rounds. Time to snake.

But I just bought my copy of Fortune Street yesterday!

I thought this happened months ago?? Anyway I'm sure they need to cut costs.

Does it make me a monster for being far too lazy to make a WEP wifi network just to download the additional Picross 3D puzzles?

hehe, I actually dug out a few DS games to go for one last shot with them, see if it just crashes at last minute.

Just played some Mario Kart Wii for the last time.

I'll see that game in hell.

@roomrunner: same here. with my bro across the country,

Nintendo only needs $10 to get back in the black, baby, get us out of this hole we're in. What's this? Mario Kart Wii's costing us $10/month and is preventing us from upgrading any of our servers somehow? Good times are here again!

I remember going out and buying Mario Kart Wii from Hollywood Video of all places, all so I could go online and play with some buddies I only knew through the internet. Spent months playing that and Brawl and it was great.

Then we stopped being friends over a girl pushing me out because I was also a girl but not THE GIRL.

Then I bought Monster Hunter Tri and played with much cooler people instead and blew an easy 3-400 hours on that. I was honestly more sad then than I am now when Tri went offline solely because it fit the online archetype much better than Nintendo's stuff ever did.

Nah that's kind of a lie. I'll miss playing Excitebots. That game was GREAT.

I cant help but notice that Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time isn't on this list. Does that mean you'll continue to be able to play that online because online FF:CC was without a doubt one of the best experiences I had on my DS.

There were DSes in college? you're so young!!!

@devil240z: man, the DS was released 9 years ago, you could have completed two bachelor's degrees in that time :P