Chris – Sunday, October 18, 2009, 12:00 AM

With Matthew out of the picture for the next week and a half or so, it seemed prudent to upload something, so here you go. I'd like to picture Matthew snoozing at a beach somewhere, but I know that's not the case. There are no picturesque beaches in Louisiana. Trust me on that one.

Ever since the Wii's online service officially kicked off with the release of Smash Bros. Brawl, I've felt that it's been a mixed bag of fun gameplay experiences and missed opportunities. For instance, few games offer you any real way to communicate with other players; there's rarely any sort of stat-tracking or leaderboard functions; and the fact that each game has to create its own friend list is just the icing on top. A few games get some of this right, but they're really the exception to the rule.

So, I was pretty excited to see this site, which is pretty great, since they've managed to provide these kinds of things for virtually all online Wii and DS titles. The site makes it easy to find other players and automatically track the statistics from the online games you play. I'm not sure why Nintendo didn't think to do this in the first place, but this is really the next-best thing.

We may have additional exciting updates this week if Matthew is able to get himself to a scanner.