The Nintendo DSi experience in Australia

Breaking my golden rule of this blog, that is not to talk about games, I’m going to talk about games. The subject here is the Nintendo DSi and the online experience of the DSI Shop and I feebly justify this as a point of view of punter rather than someone in the industry. I’m going to talk about the process of getting a new DSi, getting it onto your home wireless network and signing it up to Club Nintendo so I can buy a DSi-ware game. This stuff is pretty much the entire reason for the new DSi model being as it’s now equipped with a now-modern wireless system, loads of flash memory and stuff like that.

It’s clear to me Nintendo get the gaming mass market, hell they pretty much invented it regardless of Sony thinking they did that with the Playstation. They could do amazing things for the idea of small digital games, exactly the same way as the iPhone is getting all the press for except actually a level of volume commensurate with the press noise. With that in mind it’s obvious that getting the DSi onto your network, signed up with a payment mechanism attached, enabling one-click buying of games is pretty much in the realms of blindingly obvious.

I am, as you might gather, of a technical disposition. I’ve been doing this stuff since the very beginning and I actually found it difficult to buy a DSi-ware game. On that basis I can best describe the current situation as FAIL, with the hopeful caveat that Nintendo will fix it…

It starts with getting a DSi onto your wireless network. First you need to understand that the DSi is basically a DS with some extra sort of optional hardware features and one of those is the new decent wireless system that supports 802.11g and WPA encryption etc, exactly the sort of thing that everyone has been using at home for years now. It’s still got all the old parts in it which means the old rubbish 802.11b-only wireless. That’s fine, obviously you might still need it to play old DS games which had some wireless functionality like two-player ad-hoc.

Unfortunately when you’re confronted with the wireless set-up options you find four possible slots to put in your settings. However what is not apparent at any stage is that to use the actual decent hardware you need to hit the advanced button. Your first clue that it’s not going to work progressing through as normal is that you don’t get any option to put in anything other than a WEP key. This is not the sort of thing the mass market will know about and it’s hardly some sort of solution to suggest they drop back their router to WEP and then enter huge error-prone WEP keys (which you can only enter in hex despite the fact it doesn’t tell you and lets you type alpha numeric). Further more what should happen is that when you first switch on a DSi it should do a scan and kick up a wizard to walk you through wireless set-up.

So the wireless set up alone is enough to put off a significant percentage of the market. Lest anyone think that wireless is too hard for the mass market, that’s just not true these days. WPA and the PSK system means generally you shouldn’t need to be bothered about types of encryption or do anything other than select the access point and put in the key. The largest ISP in Australia helpfully prints the WPA-PSK key on a sticker which they put on the side of the router they give to you.

On you go to the store and you’re told to go sign up at Nintendo’s web site. Which is fair enough but … it would be sure nice if the URL they gave you took you to where you need to go, it doesn’t. And in fact if you just go and sign up on Nintendo’s web page you have actually signed up for a marketing newsletter. If you go to Nintendo Australia’s web site right now, there is no simple “sign up for Club Nintendo” yadda yadda on the front page. There’s a load of promotional DSi stuff on there, and reasonably clicking on that you’ll be told about all the colours that the DSi you just bought are available in.

If you do figure out you want the Club Nintendo link at the top of the page, with the snazzy direct URL of http://club.nintendo.com.au/NOE/en_AU/club_nintendo/clubNintendoWelcome_p4.do, you actually want Join the Club on this page. Now you’re asked for a long product code thing. This code, incidentally, is printed on a tiny little bit of paper inside the DSi box. I had lost this bit of paper, which doesn’t seem hugely unlikely to me, so I googled around and apparently you can enter the serial number of the DSi. You can’t, at least not in Australia, so I just had to tear the place apart some more to find this piece of paper.

Then you’re rewarded with the unskippable questionnaire, which is several pages. It’s going to also ask you about how many other people use your DSi and demand to know details of those, so you’re obviously going to hit back and change it to the minimum of 1. To reward you for this irritating step in the long line of irritating steps, Nintendo Australia tell you that they will give you 750 Nintendo Points. It’s 1,000 points everywhere else in the world but because this is Australia obviously anything game related needs to cost more. Actually when you do get into the shop, more on that later, in fact you do get 1,000 points anyway. So it seems the stingy arm of Nintendo hasn’t spoken to whomever makes stuff work. Probably because, at this point, there are actually three people who have ever actually got their DSi online.

Anyway, I’ve gone back to the DSi Shop and put in my username and password from Club Nintendo. It doesn’t work and I get a screen of red text with numerical error codes whinging about the username/password being wrong or somesuch. I put the machine to one side and come back after the weekend and turn the DSi on again and have another go. This time it works right away so I can only speculate that there’s a delay between setting up the account on the web site. Maybe that was a one-off but either way there’s no excuse for saying I’m going to get 750 points and then give me the full 1,000. 750 would be absurd anyway because Asphalt, the biggest selling third-party game there, is 800 points. How pleased are you going to be to be 50 points shy of being able to buy it? Not very.

So now I’ve actually bought the game and downloaded it. It doesn’t just have a button to play it, in fact I don’t know where it is at all. Turns out that it’s put a nameless gift icon on the long DSi scrolly icon-bar thing (this stupid thing should resize as needed, you click on the wrong place and it teleports you to the right hand side of this whole thing filled with unused blank icons). I seemed to recall this wasn’t there before so I click on it and sure enough Asphalt ‘unwraps’. I can see what they’re doing here, it’s cute. I can see almost the entire market in games here being games bought for someone, bought by someone that will push through the pain, for someone substantially younger or less technical to actually play. In which case really it should probably just have a gift tickbox when you’re buying it or at least offer the option to click straight through to play it if, say, you just bought it for yourself.

In fact, to be honest, the entire DSi interface is pretty rubbish. There’s different styles in different places. Names of things which really just aren’t very clear as to what would be in that sort of place. It needs to dump the names and offer up action-based icons like any well-developed user interface does. The good news is the DSi is updatable. I know this because of the significant time it took to download at patch the thing when I first got it online – apparently this incarnation isn’t even the first (shudder). So you would have to think they are going to fix this. Preferably before the big Christmas season which is fast approaching. Too late for the millions of DSis sold already, with their magical paper product code long since having been stuffed into the trash with the rest of the wrapping.

The web site, at least, could be fixed much faster. It could be fixed today. Eg put a dirty great icon on the front that says “Just got a DSi? Join club Nintendo and get 1,000 free Nintendo Points to spend on great games you can download in seconds!” – or something like that. Something other than stuff about DSis being available in pink. They could get rid of the stupid questionnaire, they could speed up their backend so it actually works when they’re doing it.

It would also be nice, on the DSi itself, if you got straight to the shop proper rather than Nintendo flogging it’s recommended stuff to you before you got there. Honestly they’re making enough money, let the third party guys have a go eh? The stuff on the recommended page isn’t that good anyway (other than the free browser and Mario). If they fixed this stuff up the DSi could turn around rapidly and become the world’s second biggest digital distribution platform after browser-based gaming. That’d be great too, because you know the DSi is a good little console. I like the bigger screens and the long battery life. The crappiness of the spec also forces people to think about gameplay and being as this is a genuine dedicated gaming device I think the DSi can sit apart from the billions of iPhone toys. Not the least because the audience can be vastly wider but right now they’re ironically confining the audience to exactly the sort of people who would have an iPhone, the early adoptor crowd who know that the obtrusive quirkiness of the DSi-ware interface is rite of passage to the hidden gems within.

It baffles me how this entire scenario could be allowed to happen. It smacks of the lack of direction from someone being in charge of the product at a top level and looking at exactly what it’s like, reading user feedback and directing the various arms to get their house into order. Software development and user interface in particular are often not the strongest skills in the Japanese product development portfolio but thankfully this is about the easiest stuff to outsource too. Curiously the whole process of making a game and getting it onto a Nintendo console goes through a rigorous checklist of well-devised tests that ensures that every game works consistently as users expect. It strikes me that the teams building the web experience and particularly the DSi console’s front-end should be subject to the same sort of overview.

There’s really only one design goal here. It should be as easy and as fast as humanly possible to get a DSi onto a network and signed up to the ecommercse system. If you ask the question of any single bit of code or UI experience in the whole chain “does this aid or does it hinder our primary design goal” and the answer is “hinder” then it should be discarded or re-written. As game players we demand those standards of games which appear on the console and we’re grateful of it. I think it’s time Nintendo applied those standards internally as well.