n the first day of Nintendo's Wi-Fi Connection on November 14, players will be able to go head to head all over the world with both Mario Kart DS and Tony Hawk’s American Sk8Land. The lineup will expand later with Animal Crossing: Wild World on December 5, and Metroid Prime Hunters on March 20, 2006. We got access to all four of the currently announced games, and all of them were online enabled except Hunters (but we did get the first look at the single player mode).

Tony Hawk’s American Sk8Land

At its core, Sk8Land is pretty standard Tony Hawk gameplay with a little Jet Grind Radio cel-shading slapped on the surface. The top screen displays all of the action while the bottom one mainly shows a map and contains quick keys for contextual special tricks. The story is loosely tied to its console big brother, American Wasteland, in that you’re trying to rebuild a long lost legendary skate park. Vicarious Visions has also taken advantage of a few of the DS’s specialties. Draw your own designs for your board or graffiti tag. Use the microphone to record custom voices for celebrations or freak outs. And when you wipe out, a freak out minigame will appear on the touch screen where you hit three moving bars at the crest of their height to build up the biggest freak out possible.

On the Wi-Fi connection you can compete in a two-player versus mode for tricks, combos, or even the classic horse. You can also post your high scores, replays, and custom designs on Nintendo’s Wi-Fi website or download someone else’s. Activision promises that additional gameplay goals and challenges will constantly be made available via download.

Mario Kart DS

We’ll be doing a full-on Mario Kart DS hands-on early next week so I’ll stick mostly to our online gaming experience at the event. Over 20 gaming journalists connected to the Wi-Fi network at Nintendo HQ, in addition to other pockets of gamers in Germany and Japan. When you connect to the network you can select global or regional, and since there’s no voice chat through the mic, the language barrier is not an issue. Some players connected instantly to one of the four player matches (local wireless mode can handle eight human players) while others were stuck waiting due to an overload of our hot spot. When we made a decent connection, the game ran just as smoothly against players halfway around the world vs. someone sitting across the table.

Every racer is labeled with their name and custom emblem. For simplicity’s sake, all of today’s emblems corresponded to the flag of the player’s country of origin. Players will also be able to trade ghost data of their best times as a way to throw down the gauntlet. They can also join teams, and the final scores and placing points are added up at the end of a four race grand prix.

Battle mode returns and takes advantage of the DS mic. The three balloons that basically signal your health in battle mode have to be inflated to be active. In order to do this you must let go of the accelerator and hit the select button or blow into the microphone. Be aware that the balloons will fill up much faster if you swallow your pride and use the blow method.

But what if you have a lot of buddies with DSs who haven’t purchased Mario Kart yet? All you need is one game cartridge to start up to eight players racing. The non-cart players can only race as Shy Guy, but that’s not too much of sacrifice.

Animal Crossing: Wild World

This quirky community game returns in December with new accessories, characters, and much easier multiplayer options. Up to four different players can visit any one town via online or wireless LAN. Open up your town gate to let others in or leave to search out other towns. You can also leave your DS in sleep mode and it will wake up whenever another Wild World player is within range – similar to the Nintendogs setup.

While interacting with others use the touch keyboard for faster and easier to type chatting. You can also use the stylus to move your character around town. And equipping your character with new items is as easy as drag and drop. But every touch screen function can be performed with the D-pad and face buttons if you prefer.

Just like the GameCube version, everything happens in real time. If you play at night, the game with take place in the dark. If you play in the winter time, your town will be covered in snow. The town museum returns with a new café run by a character named Brewster. This is a great way to meet up with NPCs to catch up on the latest town gossip.

Metroid Prime Hunters

Hunters didn’t feature any online play, but it’s also the game with the most distant release date. But we didn’t finally get the chance to play some of the single player mode. The basic plot is that Samus is flying to all sorts of different planets to collect artifacts before other bounty hunters grab them. In the demo level we tried, Samus starts out with a machine gun-type weapon. Pressing the L trigger will release a stream of bullets, but the rate of fire will slow down the longer you hold it. In a trailer displayed at the event, we were able to catch a view of two other weapons: one was a purple shotgun-type weapon with rounds that bounce off of the walls and the other was a sniper rifle – a Metroid first.

We fought several swarms of bug-like aliens and some kind of grasshopper enemy in our quest for the artifact. Part way through the level, a competing bounty hunter appeared to claim our treasure. He transformed back and forth from a humanoid form to a small inch worm. The hunter seemed like a Samus doppelganger with bombs, regular shots, and missiles. One interesting thing is that you can actually score a headshot against hunters for additional damage. The final stage boss was a large tower with several rotating lights that you had to blow out. The top row of lights constantly blasts out red lasers that were pretty tricky to dodge. Once the lights were out, and glowing ball emerged from the top of the tower to shoot energy balls at us. After you get a few decent hits in, the ball goes into hiding and the whole process repeats.

Hunters still needs a lot of work before the March release date. The framerate showed several hiccups, and the jumping mechanic is just plain unreliable. You have to double tap the touch screen and it only works about 70% of the time. After falling off platform sets for the umpteenth time, I was getting pretty fed up that Nintendo threw in so much platforming into a game that just doesn’t yet have tight enough controls to handle it.

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The Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection seems to be the real deal. I’d like to try it away from such a crowded access point, because when it came up it ran great. Not only is Mario Kart going to sell a ton of DSs, it’s also going to pull in a ton of gamers into their network with the ease of connection. And every wi-fi user can go to http://www.nintendowifi.com to see where the nearest hotspots are, check home router compatibility, and check out custom pages for each wi-fi compatible title.

It seems Nintendo is setting up a solid infrastructure, and by the time the Revolution launches sometime in 2006 we should have some more games tossed on top of the wi-fi pile. Hopefully we’ll have some Revolution launch games to play online as well.