As I grow more adjusted to online games I'm quickly becoming disapointed when a game doesn't have online capabilities.  With things like DS games, when I find out that they don't have online I seriously consider not buying them simply because of that flaw.  Online just opens the possibilities.

Yet playing against random people causes a lot of stress.  I feel like I play games way to much yet I can't beat a random person in any given game.  Nintendo's online really could use some work.  Why can't a friend and I battle a random person, and how come I can't beat random people who are probably only kids, if thats who nintendo is marketing too?

I supose there is alot I could say about online games, but I'm limited on time.  So I'll go straight to the best online.  STEAM.  Despite some critism, steam is the online gamers dream.  You can take Instant messages right from one game to another, without missing a single letter that your friend sends your way.  You can locate severs like you can in BF2 and share IP's (BF2 really needs a friend feature) but you also have the ability to use the "friend" feature to join a sever that your friend is in.  You can use in game chat, or just type things in the console, and if some one bugs you, you can simply mute them.  This is the perfect online, I understand that console games seem to have trouble creating a sever browser, but the closest they can get to this, the better.

If you can't make a sever browser the next best option would be to input what you want from a sever and the computer finds 3 or 4 matching severs and you can pick the one you want, or search again.  You couple that with a friend mode and the combination is simply flawless. 

In terms of nintendo's online I see, for the first time, that you can't communicate with random people.  This is simply a problem.  Maybe with a 'E' rated game I can understand why nintendo feels responsable to protect children but with something like a 'T' rated game (Metroid) a simple warning message should be fine.  If parents let there kids play 'T' games online, chances are the kid already has the capability to go online to a forum or myspace type page and give his adress away if he so desires.  Nintendo is only issolating its community by not letting people talk across the internet.  I don't know what my fellow gamers are thinking and that doesn't help us create an enjoyable game.

Online games aren't perfect yet but I find myself feeling that they are the future and if a company can't get a fun and open-ended online working, they simply don't deserve a spot in the race for video game supremacy.