Open All Night—But To What End?

Though they aren't nearly as prevalent as they used to be, we used to have high score threads on our forums, where we'd take games like Meteos and have a volunteer collect the everyone's high scores for competition's sake. Having a community competition like this can really expand a game's appeal; it certainly did in Meteos' case. The problem with this strategy is that it's a lot of work; players will tire of hand-copying new scores into the forums and the volunteer has a daily grind keeping the list updated.

With WiiConnect24, though, all the labor can be automated away. Messages could be exchanged between Wii consoles carrying friends' scores, building individual leaderboards on everyone's system consisting of them and the friends in their Wii Address Book who also have the games in question. If a player wishes, he could even turn on support for messages to be posted to his Message Board when new scores from a friend knocks him out of place.

Sadly, Wii releases are littered with half-or-less-assed implementations of a feature like this. The worst offender in recent memory is one of the greatest Wii games to date: Super Mario Galaxy. The game has a Star List option which shows you your performance on the games' myriad challenges, featuring coins collected, best times on appropriate levels, and the like.

Instead of sharing the actual data with your friends, allowing it to be displayed in-game and congratulating you when you're best of the bunch, Galaxy lets you send a screenshot (one per page, of four you'll have by game's end) to the Message Board. You can then forward this screenshot to a friend, who can only view it on the Message Board—seeing it in-game is verboten.

It's almost utterly useless, from the inability to get at the data in-game to the laborious manual update process, and likely wasn't even worth the time the developers spent implementing it. A system more like my proposal, which only needs to send a few small pieces of data, would enable a whole new world of friendly competition.


As soon as you're done playing any Wii game, your Wii will log your playtime to the message board titled, peculiarly enough, "Today's Accomplishments". Said message's content is pretty simple: it will display, in order, a list of the games played on that console, and the amount of time spent playing them. (How playing a game for an hour qualifies as an accomplishment I'll never quite get.)

This same information could be used to feed an opt-in system where you share with your friends what games you've been playing, and how often. It needn't get to the level of the post on your own system, but a daily message showing the top games friends have been playing would not only help build interest but could also serve as a bit of word-of-mouth for titles that might not get much attention otherwise—particularly important with WiiWare on the horizon.

Wii games have long sent accomplishments—such as obtaining Pro status in Wii Sports—to the Message Board. Why not optionally send these to friends as well? Again, doing this would help build interest among friends about Wii games, increasing their value.

Of Wii titles released so far, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption's Friend Voucher system is notable for taking part of this idea; achievements in the game turn into points that can be sent off to friends, which they can in turn use as in-game currency. However novel this is, a system where all interested parties can track the progress of a friend playing a game probably holds more value.