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Following an agreement made with Wayport, a wireless Internet provider, Nintendo announced yesterday their plan for allowing easy and free access to wireless online play on their DS handheld: 6,000 McDonald's restuarants across the US will soon become Wi-Fi Connection hosts, permitting gamers to play Internet-enabled DS games against people all around the Net while in the comfortable vicinity of fast food.

Yes, you read that correctly.

As stated by Nintendo, players need only start up an online compatible DS game at one of the participating McDonald's to play, sans any fees or extra hardware - it's guaranteed to be simple and cost-free. The timing of this announcement comes as little surprise given the upcoming releases of the first two online games for the Nintendo DS, Mario Kart DS and Tony Hawk's American Sk8land, both due to ship to North American stores on November 14th. Other future titles, including Metroid Prime Hunters and Animal Crossing: Wild World will also make ample use of Wi-Fi Connection.

McDonald's is only the most recent corporation to catch the DS fever. Other businesses, such as Starbucks and a growing league of game shops, will also participate in hosting wireless Internet for public gaming.

Source: GameSpot

This post has been edited by SilverFork on 19th October 2005 21:25

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Words of Wisdom:

If something can go wrong, it will.

If anything simply cannot go wrong, it will anyway.

If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong. - Murphy’s Law

Boing! Zoom! - Mr. Saturn

Eh? Mickey D's you say? I think my eyes are not reading this correctly. I guess this is good for Nintendo, now that they are sort of officialy going to be online. Now little kids have an excuse to bring their DS to McDonald's. Hopefully more non fastfoods locations will follow.

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Dead Winter. A nice comic.

Potentially good move Nintendo, potentially bad move McDonalds. Won't this just encourage the noisy gamer element to loiter? 20min (the time after which they start to consider a customer as loitering... at least where I'm from) is ample time to eat your chicken nuggets and fries, but not nearly enough time to have a good round of almost any multiplayer game. Really, I don't quite understand why McDonalds would do this.

P.S. "SK8land" is part of the official title? That's sad.

Well, if people stay there for extended periods of time, they have to eat something sooner or later and that something will be McD's fattening food. Perhaps that's what McD's is looking forward to, but after eating that crap, the people'll be playing their games rather than using that time to run around and burn all the crap off. McD's is just asking for more silly lawsuits to be lobbed their way because "Oh, McD's made me SOOOO fat!!"

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Console RPG Cliches

I'd rather just pay for the service instead of killing time at a fast food joint in order to play for free, assuming that option's available; they weren't exactly clear past this deal. Course, most people probably will go this route, which is kinda another reason I wanna avoid it. Noise. Ugh.

And yes, "Sk8land" is in the name. GameSpot's apparent typo fooled me into believing that was a capital 'K' - which doesn't exactly make the 1337 SP33K look any better or worse - but GameFAQs says otherwise. Who knows?

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Words of Wisdom:

If something can go wrong, it will.

If anything simply cannot go wrong, it will anyway.

If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong. - Murphy’s Law

Boing! Zoom! - Mr. Saturn

Oh yes yes lets get our kids to play games and eat fast food so they can get lazy and fat!. It's strange I thought nintendo of america wanted us to be more active. It's an ok idea but Mickey D's isn't the best place for this sort of thing.

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"You know that feeling you get when you're on a merry go 'round, and you want to jump off to make the spinning stop, but you know it'll suck when you land? I feel like that all the time"- Keno

"I stab my girl until I fall down"
-Yukari
Do you like Horny Bunnies?

I'm not seeing how this could work well, unless you were willing to spend ample amounts of money on McD's crappy food.

I can just see the manager of a store pushing gamers out the door because they are spending all their time at McDonalds playing on their DS and not buying food. I mean how much food would you have to buy in order to not get kicked out for loitering if you planned to stay there with your friends and play for...let's say 3 hours? Doesn't sound very free to me. Especially with the pounds you would put on from eating McDonald's food all day.

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-- You're Gonna Carry That Weight --

Will online play only be available at Wireless Servers at McD.'s or can any high-speed internet hook-up suffice? Places like Whataburger and Barnes and Noble around here already offer free wireless internet. Can the DS be played there as well?

After an extensive search to make sense of the confusion (no thanks to many equally vague articles), you will in fact be able to use any wireless network. McDonald's is only being added to the roster of businesses who've agreed to host Wi-Fi, but you'll technically be able use it anywhere available.

Now that that's cleared up, I think I'll update the original post...

Many apologies for the inconvenience.

This post has been edited by SilverFork on 19th October 2005 21:32

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Words of Wisdom:

If something can go wrong, it will.

If anything simply cannot go wrong, it will anyway.

If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong. - Murphy’s Law

Boing! Zoom! - Mr. Saturn

Makes sense. McDonald's caters to the same group that video games do: adolescent males. They're going to attract more business by having the free network, and what business they do attract is going to hang around and snack longer because of the games.

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Veni, vidi, dormivi.

Thanks for the clarification!

Well, this will derinetly get the teenage young adult male population to go to McD's. Around where I live, Mickey D's just isn't the best hangout restarurant when you can go to the Tropical Smoothee Cafe, Starbucks, and Panera Bread. I wonder if they'll extend the "loitering rule" for DS gamers?

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Dead Winter. A nice comic.

McDs though? Honestly wouldn't you rather go to something like a place in a games shop or something, as opposed to the sticky-floored fat factory kind of place?

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The frosty one.

Can ye get a Big Mac at a games shop? Uhh, no. Last I checked, me local Game Stop didn't have fries or Chicken McNuggets, either. I imagine that, for some people, McD's with free gaming networking is like heaven on Earth.

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Console RPG Cliches

I imagine that heaven would soon get very fat and heavy and slow. If you want food then get some first. And besides, McDs isn't the only place to get food.

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The frosty one.

Now if someplace like Starbucks or Subway's got the wi-fi, then it what be awsome. At least the worst lawsuit one could do on Starbucks is burning getting burned by coffee, and we all know that lawsuit won't happen.

Oh yeah. It did. AT MCDONALD's!

This post has been edited by Barrylocke on 21st October 2005 17:33

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Dead Winter. A nice comic.

Quote (Barrylocke @ 21st October 2005 13:33)

Now if someplace like Starbucks or Subway's got the wi-fi, then it what be awsome. At least the worst lawsuit one could do on Starbucks is burning getting burned by coffee, and we all know that lawsuit won't happen.

Oh yeah. It did. AT MCDONALD's!

Since it was confirmed later in the thread that you could use any wifi network, Starbucks would be a fine place to go do it (since most or all of their locations have wifi now). Better environment than McD's, I'd say, at the very least. But you could even do it from home with a wireless router.

The main point here is that McDonald's is the one promoting it specifically. Which is brilliant for the reasons Karasuman mentioned (among others).

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?

I think McDs tries to attract bratty little kids that dont buy anything for themselves, are under 16, have mobiles and think they're sooooo coooool. Idiots.

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The frosty one.