I was at the digital life trade show today. They had Mario Kart and Animal Crossing both playable. I couldn’t resist opening the Wi-Fi menus to answer all those questions that neither Buffalo nor Nintendo would acknowledge. Rest assured, the answers are good. I still don’t know why Nintendo just didn’t spit it out. I took some pictures of the interface to show I’m not making this up.
What it boils down to is this. The Nintendo DS will support AOSS for connecting very easily to access points. It will also connect very easily to the Nintendo USB adapter. But if you have a normal wireless access point you can still use it. You can even use WEP. You cannot use WPA or anything other than WEP. You can statically or dynamically(dhcp) configure your ip settings after you get a signal.
This means that on those long road trips you can get your Verizon EV-DO PCMCIA card, plug it into your laptop, create an ad-hoc wireless lan and get your DSes online for some worldwide Mario Kart action!
See how easy this was? These are the only tiny tidbits of information that people needed and Nintendo was not revealing. This is not even rumor, this is fact. I used the interface myself and took pictures of it. The only way this could possibly be untrue is if Nintendo spontaneously decides to heavily modify the software between now and release. But from what I played I doubt that will happen. These seemed like very finished games. I think the only thing that is keeping them off shelves is that they need to produce enough copies and packaging and distribute them.
So Mario Kart DS and the new Superstar Saga are sold. Animal Crossing will sell to a lot of people, but probably not me. The rest of the trade show was cool, but nothing really interesting except for the pepper pad.
