New Super Mario Bros. Wii Only Multiplayer At Home

Eh? but it looks like the flippin DS game!

Thats the weakest excuse ever used in the history of mankind (possibly). There is no way this is using all of the Wii's power IMO.
Oh no! 4 player sprites and 4 enemy sprites on the screen at the same time, save us!

I might get battered for this, but I expected this, and I'm glad of it. Just because something's multiplayer doesn't mean it should have online multiplayer as part of the package: this is the sort of game where I'd much rather have my friends over to play it than have to play with them online.

So, yeah, whereas I don't think much to Miyamoto's reasoning, I definitely think he's made the right decision.

If the cooperative-mixed-with-competitive gameplay is anywhere near as brilliant and enjoyable as Four Swords Adventures, which the end of level rankings from these videos evoke, I'm greatly looking forward to this, and I have to agree that this kind of game is only really enjoyable locally.

I hope they include the voting from Four Swords, where you each pick the most helpful and least helpful player at the end of a level, and it adjusts their coins accordingly. That requires you to get ahead in coins while not burning any bridges or excessively alienating your friends, or you're sure to get voted down.

The reality is that online play simply isn't a focus for Nintendo at this time. By the time they're ready to do a new console Gigabit fibre will be more widespread in Japan and maybe we'll have better network connectivity in PAL/NA that will sort out latency issues.

I don't know enough about the way games are programmed to know if it's baloney or not. I suppose it's possible to use up all the processing power with a game like this, everything is in 3D except the environment, which might be made from 2D textured vector objects, which would run off the 3D graphics processor. I don't see how Mario Kart can have 8 players online and this can't handle 4, maybe it's the amount of data from a character, the movements would need to be a lot more accurate for smooth multiplayer platforming. i don't know...

@Dazza:
Play it with the kids! Problem solved.

Graphics have almost no effect on the quality of game play. Game play is the winning focus.

Who cares, this is still game of the year material. Day 1 purchase.

take out the offline Multi-player, and put in the Online multi-player

cop-out, excuse, john, etc.

@Chicken and Dazza
Yea, that's what I was going to say. I thought that's why people have kids: potential play mates.

Big whoop. I'm still buying this day one. I've plenty of peoples to play with over here.

I don't really mind. Whenever I try to go online with any other Wii game, I just get dissapointed anyway. Forget the online stuff and go straight to making the levels the best they can be, Miyamoto and Nintendo. Of course, Miyamoto doesn't have to lie to us. We get it, you don't care about online play. Just say that.

No online, no sale. Sorry, but I don't have any buddies to get together that live close by, and I doubt the game was made for the single player in mind.

The game is supposed to have around 80 levels. It is safe to assume that the later levels will feature significantly more enemies and interactive elements than the ones shown during the small video or demo. Imagine two Hammer Bros throwing out a near-continuous streams of hammers, jumping on rows of destructible blocks, with Bullet Bills flying in from the side and a lot of collectable coins hovering nearby. That's a lot to keep track of, and that's not including the four hero characters, several of which might be pestering the enemies with fire balls. Now considering it's vital for the game to register who collects which single coin first (which is the whole idea of the multiplayer game), with four consoles registering their own results and possible lag-time... I can sort of understand why they decided to keep it offline.

I wouldn't mind except for the "already uses all the processing power" excuse. Bull, Shiggy. Just cop to that Ninty (or you) decided not to put the effort in for that. Because as of now we already know that no one put the effort in to make this look any better than the DS game.

This game would be great online. Another Nintendo screw up thanks to their laziness of not wanting to enable online play.

I really thought that Nintendo were going release a Mario 2D Wii-Ware title. That's what the Wii-ware service really needs, to be given a huge boost but it's a clever move on Nintendo's part putting the game on a Wii-disc so that it gets to a wider audience and quickly. I just hope you can play it on your own too, this game will get huge coverage in Nintendo publications right up till it's launch and after, We can't get Nintendo Power magazine in the UK but their coverage will be huge and well documented. However here in the UK we get N-Gamer that's quite good and then we get an Official Nintendo magazine, but for me Nintendo Power is better. Going back to having four players, it's an interesting addition to the game, I'm really looking forward to this game coming out. It will appeal to many people but it'll will still get a few critics on the way. Hat's off to Nintendo, this game will be a Christmas sell out, Mario Galaxy 2 won't appear until Easter 2010 at the earliest. So could this mean Nintendo will release Mario all Stars on VC or Am I getting too excited?

It might be a comment not really geared for this particular feature but Sega should really look at doing a 2D version of Sonic!!

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

I don't see how Mario Kart can have 8 players online and this can't handle 4
Mario Kart was 12 players. But only 2 per console (probably due to some objects vanishing with more than 3 players).

I can see why. In a racing game it doesn't matter too much where your opponents are. There is lag in Mario Kart Wii. When you hit another player with a shell and about half a second later they react, thats your lag. Also, teleporting players.

It doesn't have much impact since player to player collisions are not a big part of the game. While in a fighting game or this you can see it being a greater part. We all know how "great" Super Smash Bros online was...

@Wesbert - That's a lot easier to keep track of than you think. You can throw thousands of objects on the screen and not make a CPU sweat a 2D game. Think about it. You're talking about managing X/Y & Acceleration values. Throw in a bit of gravity and collision. Still not that much when compared against 800,000,000 cycles per second.

The graphics could be an issue if the system didn't have a powerful GPU. But it does. And the GPU is designed to handle several million textured polygons per second. Granted, that's an upper bound. But dealing with a few thousand scalable sprites per frame shouldn't make it sweat too badly. Certainly not enough to get the CPU involved.

The networking thing is a cop-out. Pure and simple.

Reply to Cipher Post #4: You're right. Considering that this is the first main Mario mutiplayer games, we shouldn't't complain so much about the lack of online play. It's not that bad.

Reply to WiiGuy Post #12: That's a terrible suggestion. It isn't going to work.

@ thewiirocks: Not quite, because you forget a lot of the items are interactive (fireballs bounce, blocks break...). Perhaps a better example for the problem I wanted to hint at would be the see-saw. Two characters stand at either end, an equilibrium. If both jump, the reaction can differ quite a lot depending on who jumped first, and even if it is just by a millisecond. Now, unless there's a perfect synchronization between all four systems (or the two systems of the two players standing on the see-saw at least), there will be a discrepancy between what happens on one system and what happens on the other. The see-saw tilts one way on one system, and the other way on the other. As Starwolf_UK already hinted at, such things don't matter too much in a racing game. The general position and acceleration of the cars and fired objects is enough. The same applies to most FPS (look closely in multiplayer matches; you'd be surprised how much characters jitter around in some of them). But it doesn't matter with those games whether the positions are off by a pixel or two (except for closely zoomed in headshots, but any imperfection is more easily attributed to human failure). In a game requiring pixel-perfect jumping and precise timing, however, this is a game-breaker. Even the slightest lag could mean you land in a bottomless pit. And since there is no instantaneous information transfer, slight lag is impossible to avoid. That's why most Multiplayer-FPS have so little truly interactive arenas.
Calculating things is easy. Synchronizing across larger distances across up to four systems not so much any more.

Online would have been nice, but I don't care this game is going to be a blast to play!!!

I hope single player is as fun as multiplayer, because multiplayer looks like a lot of fun. Period.

i'm glad there is no wifi.

in a game where you can play cooperativly, or sabotage your teammates, i would hate it if it was wifi. Every 2 seconds would be someone throwing you into a goomba. The fact that a total of 12 people even have wiispeak, kills any chance of online cooperation anyway.

Im actually psyched about local multiplayer, i have plenty of people to play this with.

I care more about the second Toad, one of them should be replaced by a more significant character, for visual reasons

I knew it wouldn't happen.

@Wesbert - The physics in this game are not a computational issue. For all the glitz they have, the physics are fine. If you want to argue that it's too difficult from a networking perspective, I can buy that. It isn't even a bandwidth issue as much as it is a latency issue. That's why racing games and what-not tend to show a lot of jitter.

That being said, it doesn't change that Miyamoto's answer was a cop-out. "After evaluating the situation with home networks, we didn't believe the experience would be good" would be a better answer. This nonsense about the CPU being too busy is just that. Nonsense.

Who cares for online. This is a game thats more fun locally anyway. I am still going to buy this.

@ thewiirocks: Yes, I did mean from a networking perspective (As you might have noticed, I have a slight problem of getting straight to the point). As for Miyamoto, remember he had to give a quick answer to a reporter not all that well versed in these things (who probably doesn't speak Japanese). It's understandable the point is not all that well made.

I agree with WhoKnew. Online mode never even occured to me as a good idea for this game, I want to play it with a friend at home, thats it.

This game must have as much interaction between players as Brawl, which means wifi would be a major fail, gladly their starting to comprehend the limits of the wii's networking. I'm eager to play this game with my friends!

I laughed at the idea that the game is using up all of the Wii's power. Let's take a look at the New Metroid for that excuse.

I'm not bothered about it being offline but making an excuse like that is pretty silly since it does look alot like the DS iteration.

He could have at least made the option available for people who wouldn't mind battling their mates online.

@Wesbert - Don't worry about it too much. I have the same problem.

this is.... a flippin' shame... not much else to say.

OMG, people on this forum are so stupid, if you guys don't know anything about programming, shut the hell up.

This kind of game takes up much of the cpu just because of the programming ahead, it actually takes up more memory than Galaxy's levels do. Allowing 4 players to interact with all that will put the cpu's work to the max. Online play would easily double the ammount of memory cause of syncronisation necessary to make a game like this work.

The amount of work that 4 players cause is probably the reason why the game looks just like it's DS version, better graphics and the 4 playermode would've lagged the hell out of this game.

Online is cool but not always necessary.

Sheesh. People need to quiet down about the whole online thing in games. I cannot fathom how an online mode would be at all good for a game like this, especially considering the big N's network restrictions.

@MrPanic - For the record, I'm a programmer by trade. By the way you use "memory" and "cpu" interchangeably (not to mention such colorful and inaccurate uses of "synchronization" and "work to the max") Mr. Wesbert and I are not the ones in need of programming lessons.

Gee Whiz, Wii can only handle a 3-D side-scroller? Hmm... Something tells me Miyamoto was just trying to cover his ass. lol.

That announcement has finalized my decision not to get this why focus on multiplayer go with a awesome single player

how bout 2 different CD's? or a SD card that lets us play wifi.

To be honest I think that the lack of online is a good idea. When you are aaround other people there is a certein amount of social interaction that you can't acieve online. I would rather be playing with people I know than with some random person over the internet.

Has anyone considered the possibility of mistranslation or the simple fact that he probably doesn't mean exactly what everyone seems to be thinking?
I think we can explain this whole thing simply by saying that this game would not be possible with any trace of lag. It would simply ruin it. In a Mario game, timing and accuracy of movement are life and death. Now there's cooperation involved. And to think that it's possible to create an online game that never lags is simply wrong. It isn't possible. And I'm willing to bet that this game can get frustrating enough as it is.
Case closed.

^^^^^AMEN!

well yeah nintendo does have a point, i mean how exactly would it work? 80 levels and wifi, people would never have the time to actually make it to the end in that time

Well, I don't have the internet on the wii ( cause I don't know how to get it ). Everybody should be greatfull that they can EVEN PLAY MUTLIPLAYER on it cause what if it was only a 1 player game. Thanks Nintendo for leting us play mutliplayer.

@BooNelson
DSi version? is there one coming out? I haven't heard anything about that... what is it called? any videos? images?