The Kingdom of Philtopia

I bought Splatoon 2 on launch day, I had never tried the original because I never had a Wii U so I wasn’t sure what to expect. It didn’t take long after going through the tutorial and playing some turf wars to become addicted to this seemingly harmless online shooter.

What makes this relevant to the topic is Nintendo decided to launch the initial offering of their future online services using this game which brings us to:

Nintendo Online app

I downloaded the app the first day to see what it did. It is a very plain screen with a brief helper on how to set up a lounge and an invitation list. At launch tapping Splatoon 2 icon seemed to do nothing which seemed odd. I set up a lounge fairly easily from within the game and then my phone popped up a notification and I opened it up. So far worked as expected even if it is a bit unusual to use the phone in this manner.

It did seem a bit odd to me that there was nothing else to go on but after being an avid Wii user long ago I wasn’t expecting much from Nintendo’s online attempts to begin with so I shrugged, closed the app and didn’t look at it again for almost a week.

Splatnet 2

About a week later I noticed a news item on the console for Splatnet 2, it may have become available sooner but I wasn’t paying attention much during the week. I followed the instructions in the article and found that all my stats and progression were available. Pretty cool.

You could also click share on pretty much every area of your game play. Also cool

So now Nintendo is showing their hand a bit more and I like what I see. This allows me to have a portable brag device to show off to any of my buddies or to share on Facebook to try and lure some competition into the game.

Another nifty feature is it seems to be able to “share” to any supported app on the platform, I was able to do Facebook, Twitter, Save to Photos and even shared it to a group on Whats App. If this is what they’re planning to do for other games I’m on board. I hope they add Mario Kart 8 and Street Fighter II to this service at some point as those are two other multiplayer games I play ranked on a regular basis.

One ask I do have is it would be nice if you could access your Switch screenshot gallery from the app to make sharing easier than the 1 at a time system that is available on the console.

Aside from the awkward voice chat set up which I don’t even care about anyways, Good job Nintendo, Splatnet 2 is a hit with me.