GBA WiFi a missed opportunity?

[casterofdreams]

With all this talk about remaking games from past generations such as Serious Sam and Perfect Dark, I think Nintendo missed an opportunity to make loads of money here. Those two games now support online multiplayer, something they did not do (or do well) before. The Gameboy Advance was and still is a great hand held system with a huge library of top notch titles to boot, but imagine they had the opportunity to go WiFi. An example would have been to take advantage of the DS hardware or to release them in a package like what companies are doing to the Megaman Zero GBA series and enable WiFi. There could be a lot of money to be made here since there isn't a GBA slop on the DSi and the next DSi XL.

Great examples would be Mario Kart, Pokemon, Megaman Battle Network, Advance Wars, Fire Emblem or even Golden Sun.

Just food for thought.

[noiseredux]

I think I read somewhere that they had intentions to do that. Maybe something along the lines of the wireless link cable. But ultimately they decided against it. Maybe because wifi was still relatively new to people at the time?

[17daysolderthannes2]

when the GBA came out, even laptops barely used Wi-Fi. Even if they did, they needed big ass adapters that were half the size of a GBA by themselves. Nintendo needed to wait until the technology was small enough to integrate into the system.

[emwearz]

Nintendo have pretty much always been about using common technology in news ways, cant remember the actual saying but I am sure someone will.

[CRTGAMER]

I think I read somewhere that they had intentions to do that. Maybe something along the lines of the wireless link cable. But ultimately they decided against it. Maybe because wifi was still relatively new to people at the time?

GBA though does have a wireless link adaptor, but not all link games used it.
Its not Wifi just local wireless connection similiar to wired link cable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Advance_Wireless_Adapter

[emwearz]

They are pretty common, most Cash Converters generally have a few of them about.

[noiseredux]

I think I read somewhere that they had intentions to do that. Maybe something along the lines of the wireless link cable. But ultimately they decided against it. Maybe because wifi was still relatively new to people at the time?

GBA though does have a wireless link adaptor, but not all link games used it.
Its not Wifi just local wireless connection similiar to wired link cable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Advance_Wireless_Adapter

yeah I know. THa'ts what I meant by "along the lines of the wireless link cable."

[CRTGAMER]

GBA though does have a wireless link adaptor, but not all link games used it.
Its not Wifi just local wireless connection similiar to wired link cable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Advance_Wireless_Adapter

yeah I know. THa'ts what I meant by "along the lines of the wireless link cable."

Okay, my mistake.

[Josh]

Yeah I have one of those. Really, those wireless adapters aren't even close to Wi-fi, since less than 50 games used it, and you had to be pretty much in the same room as the guy using the thing. I found it relatively worthless.

Do I wish they had modified the games to work off of DS Wi-Fi? Yes. Would've increased the replay value of many games, including Pokemon, Mario Kart, Mario Party Advance, etc. Could've had some easy money and increased sales. But hey, since Ninty has pretty much thrown the GBA in the toilet, I guess the only way is if someone were to mod the games using net-play of some sort.

[casterofdreams]

There is a misconception about my original post. I'm talking about now not when the thing was released, like what Microsoft is doing to perfect dark or having halo 2 being able to use the Internet feature on the xbox 360. Using this gen tech, nintendo can make alot of money if they somehow unlocked the wifi feature for gba games on the lite and lower hardware. Or even rerelease some popular games again in one cart like how capcom is doing this to the megaman zero series, but with wifi multiplayer. Perhaps remake a gba game and release it through dsiware.