Image courtesy of Gizmodo.

I've almost saved enough of my hard earned moolah to be able to buy a Nintendo DS, although Mrs Teh Bagder would rather I put the money towards our future Wii. I've been thinking about getting one for a while because there are a couple of really awesome games out for the platform, such as Planet Puzzle League, Puzzle Quest, Super Mario Bros etc. Just another few bucks and I'm at the golden point to being able to afford to do it.

I'm pissed though. Nintendo have pushed WEP as the WiFi standard they use on the DS. Rather than implementing both WPA and WEP and allowing the user to choose which to choose, they're forcing people to use an easily crackable insecure wireless network protocl.

We use WPA at home for a couple of reasons. It's more robust, harder to crack, doesn't have latency issues and seems to have less dropped packets. There is no way that I'm going to downgrade the wireless network that all of our computers at home use so that I can play a DS online. Sure, I can get the additional USB stick that provides WPA for the DS, but why should I have to pay for that when WPA can easily be added in the first place? Yes, I know I can do WEP with MAC filtering, but I just don't want to use WEP. It sucks.

You see, I could easily fix the problem by downgrading, or running the additional wireless router that I've got on the network to run WEP (It's part of the NAS unit). I don't want to have to do this. I don't want to use WEP at all. Nope, not at all. Never, ever. Looks like I'll have to if I want to get a DS though.

Do you ever get the feeling that games companies put these obstacles in place to ensure that you personally save money? Nope, me neither.

Categories: Borked, Opine //