Nintendo’s pulling out all the stops to promote the Wii’s online capabilities; a new “Get It Online” campaign on their website looks set to show what you can do with that little white box if you bother to connect it to your wireless network.

That’s all great, but aren’t Nintendo a little slow off the mark? Read on to see what we think.

The new campaign, over at Nintendo’s UK website, details how you can get your Wii connected to the internet and promotes some of the games you can play online like Mario Kart and Pro Evolution Soccer. There’s also some promotional material for the Nintendo Channel (propaganda), WiiWare and the Virtual Console, as well as the Forecast & News Channels.

This is all well and good, but it’s taken Nintendo two and a half years to promote the Wii’s online capabilities properly. This isn’t much of a surprise, considering how shoehorned-in the online features appear to be.

The service can be laggy and connections and drop easily. The Friend Code system is overly complicated and unnecessarily fidgety. There isn’t much in the way of community considering the lack of voice chat features outside of Animal Crossing. All in all, the console was never designed for online gaming and Nintendo are refusing to accept it.

Are they trying too hard to sell the console some more, then? Granted, most of Nintendo’s new campaign is directed at the non-gaming things you can do with the Wii – watch videos, surf the internet, check the weather, send photos, etc etc – so it’s apparent that they’re trying to get current owners online too. But there are still people out there who (believe it or not) haven’t bought a Wii.

What do you think Nintendo’s ambition is with this campaign? I personally think it’s a contest for bragging rites: with the utterly huge install base the Wii has, it’d be incredibly easy for Nintendo to climb the “online users” chart and claim a 1-up over Microsoft and Sony. Numbers talk more than anything and ‘we have more online users than the other online consoles’ would say even more than that.

What do you think? Do you even use your Wii online? Will this campaign make you think twice? Sound off in the comments below…

Source: CVG

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