Ok, I love Nintendo just as much as the next old-school gamer, but I’m not afraid to give the verbal lashing where it is due. Iwata-san, I’m afraid you’ve made a nasty mistake when you agreed that using shared Friend codes in each individual game were a good idea. I’ve tried to understand the rationale, and there are certainly some benefits particularly in the realm of security for the younger players and their parents, but let’s face it.. the system as it is currently implemented burdens the player to a point beyond tedium.

My 11-year-old son and I spent over an hour on the phone today, agonizing over the fact that we had both entered our respective friend codes, yet Mario Kart Wii continued to report a giant “?” on the friends screen, disappointing us with a cold and useless “You’re not friends yet.” I hope that you can easily see how this is a fundamental UI design flaw.

“But wait Nick, you should’ve send an invite from in-game direct to your son’s Wii. That would have worked much easier!” Right, actually, we tried that first. 24-hours later, the end result? My kiddo’s Wii showed my Mii just fine, ready for play, but MY side showed the big “?” yet again, leading us into the whole hour-long conversation in the first place.

This whole frustration could easily have been eliminated with a few basic modifications:

1. Add a message indicating that once the Wii Codes are added on both sides, it might be several hours before your new friend(s) will be available in-game to play.(Though really the ultimate fix is to remove or drastically reduce this latency to a more acceptable few minutes.)
2. If you invite a friend from your Wii Address Book, and they accept, automatically add them to the inviting player’s Friend’s list immediately. Currently, you get a message when you log into the game saying that JoeFriend has accepted and has been added to your friends list, but then if you go straight to the friends list, it shows his Friend Code but indicates that you’re still not friends yet!
3. Speaking of those invites. When you RECEIVE an invite from a friend to be added to their friends list, do you really have to log into the game each time you get an invite, just to add them to your list? Instead, you should add a simple in-game UI window at login showing the list of invites with individual ACCEPT and DENY buttons, naturally only appearing when you have an outstanding queue of incoming invitations.

I understand that Nintendo tries very hard to think differently than it’s competitors, usually to great success, but there’s no good excuse for poor design in this new social-networking society. Not when they generally raise the bar very high for the development world.