Nintendo is an interesting beast. After shouting “it’s about games, not convergance” over and over, they ship the Wii with a news reader, weather center and and handful of other non gaming stuff. Yet according to this joystiq report, the MP3 functionality is pretty crippled. Sure it’s lame there is no real player, and the only way to hear tunes is to insert a song into a photo slideshow. But the real tragedy is that in game soundtrack replacement is going to be handled on a game by game basis.Of course, the faithful are quick to defend this, shocked at the horrors of replacing epic Zelda tunes with Korn and Limp Biscuit. The easy way around this is to bite Microsoft and handle it like they do- system wide, with the ability for developers to override if they go out of their way to do so. People with big budgets scoring RPGs can insist their scores are heard, and developers that rely on music to cue users can do the same. But the vast majority of games, especially those with high replay value should really make it easy for users to modify their soundtracks.

Making developers add it in themselves is a pain in the ass for both devs (who may just skip it), and users, who will have to deal with a different mechanism for everygame that supports it. Standard hooks also make it easy to add some additional features, such as netowrked play. Again, stealing a cue from Microsoft. If your console has a network connection and can play back mp3s, why copy them to an SD card when you most likely have a PC or mac on that same network with gigs of music? Let me stream it in game (iPod support wouldn’t hurt either).

It’s not a deal breaker for me, or that wii, but it is abit of a let down- especially considering the vast amount of mini game collections and other party games that will surely make their way to the system. Falling back to “it’s all about games” is a piss poor excuse for second rate feature implementation, especially when those features can enhance our gameplay experience.