Coming Soon: DS Wi-Fi

If you’re a Nintendo DS owner, you’ll doubtless be aware that your machine, or more correctly, your "DS experience" isn’t quite finished yet. And nor will it be, until the launch later this year of the Wi-Fi network that will allow you to interact with other DS owners outside your current 10 metre range.

The completely free service will be realised by a mini Interweb of ‘hotspots’. Thankfully nothing at all to do with Michael Barrymore, these hotspots will cover key areas that, if you’re really lucky, may even include your home. Good news for those of you who live in vibrant, thriving metropoleis, rather less exciting should you happen to be the sole inhabitant of Dunny-on-the-Wold.

In case you’re not aware of this huge step forward in handheld gaming, you soon will be, even if you haven’t being paying attention to this article. Nintendo are launching a huge marketing campaign, centred around a minute long advert coming soon to a cinema near you. Quite, er, cinematic in style, the advert features a character who is rather unlikely to own a DS. And while the references to Mario Kart and global connectivity are clear enough to us geeky types, we’re not so sure that ‘normal’ people will understand exactly what they’re being sold here. The whole ‘Touching is good’ campaign went over a lot of their heads you know. However, these same people - the non-gamer girls and grown-ups that the Big N are seeking to target these days - are in our experience generally pretty impressed when they see the DS in action. It’s odd that the adverts don’t have a little more of the infomercial about them, rather than this more obscure nudge and wink approach.

But if you are a regular cinema-goer, you’ll see for yourself soon enough. Unless, like us, you always arrive 20 minutes later than the listed programme time to avoid the evangelical promotion of consumerism.