Whilst most people may think that have successfully brought the in time for Christmas, in reality the WFC technology is currently immature and WFC-compatible games have been blighted on occasion by poorly realised functionality. Both Kart DS and Animal Crossing: Wild World suffer from poor multiplayer matching, and a complete lack of it sometimes. Both games are still great in their own right, but I'm sure gamers are left with the feeling that online multiplayer is currently nothing more than a gimmick.

The technology, however, is there for significant improvements to be made, although no console multiplayer matching services have reached the level of those available on personal computers it is entirely possible for something close to surface on the DS. What follows is a breakdown of the flaws in both Mario Kart and Wild World with possible solutions, plus a brief look at the possible future of WFC gaming when it is introduced in FPS, and possibly even genres.

Mario Kart suffers from the classic problems every player encountered; the inability to quickly and easily find a group of players with the same level of skill. With the introduction of the improved Live service for 360, have gone a long way toward rectifying this problem. Gamers are now split into groups of their own choosing which indicates what type of players they want to play with. In Mario Kart you simply go online and wait to be matched up with a group of completely random players. Either that or the task of finding a group of friends to play with and organising a game is left entirely to the players themselves, something that distracts entirely from the easy sit-in-the-living-room-and-play mentality you would expect from the DS.

Animal Crossing suffers from a different problem altogether; the complete lack of any sort of inbuilt multiplayer matching. The principle behind Animal Crossing is that one player can open his or her town and other players can visit. In order to visit another players town you must be on their friends roster, and them on yours. The problem therein is the complete lack of any mechanism within Animal Crossing to exchange these friend codes, instead players must turn to third party meeting systems such as the unfinished DSMeet.com, or communicate with their friends with their favourite chat or messenger client. Animal Crossing could just as easily have implemented an "Open Town" system where players can open their town to any other player who wishes to visit, then they could selectively choose who is allowed in when players attempt to enter. Additionally a simple "chat room" system could have been implemented, letting players meet each other in chat, exchange tips, and exchange friend codes using a one-click inbuilt system that doesn't require the player to manually enter the long numeric code, plus the friends name and town title.

As for the future, games like Prime: Hunters will almost certainly implement the traditional styles of multiplayer online play, additionally there is the possibility of co-operative play or even counter-operative play. For fair multiplayer matches to work, players would have to be matched on their skills and achievements with either a manual skill selection, or a stats tracking system that decides a players ability based on their win/loss ratio and performance in game.

The possibilities for RPG, or MMORPG titles is huge. With DS game carts being, at base level, a piece of that extends the DS cartridges can be supplied with cache storage. This means the game content of an MMORPG could be updated and cached from a server, and even the core game code could be flash updated. Massively multiplayer online games on the DS wouldn't require any complex multiplayer matching, and essentially provide the whole community with a way to communicate, get into parties and have some good solid fun without having to deal with any of the nitty gritty friend code exchanging we have at the moment. With the right software and game cart hardware the possibilities are endless, we just need a developer brave enough to take a leap of faith and take full advantage of them. Indeed, the same can be said of the WFC overall at present, opportunities exist, by they are currently shamefully under-exploited. We'll keep you posted on all things DS and online.

By Philip Howard